OTI Welcomes First Ford/Mozilla Open Web Fellow

OTI is excited to welcome Gem Barrett (@gembarrett) to OTI in the first class of Open Web Fellows, a collaboration between the Ford Foundation and Mozilla. This initiative brings emerging technology talent to spend 10 months embedded at OTI and five other leading advocacy organizations. The six technologists who make up the inaugural Open Web Fellows class will spend this period contributing to the important work of the hosting organizations, and develop their leadership voice in the fight for digital freedom.

OTI is proud to be a host for the first class of fellows, along with other leading advocacy organizations, including the ACLU of Massachusetts, Amnesty International, Association for Progressive Communications (APC), Free Press, and Public Knowledge.

Gem is a technologist and speaker who has extensive design and development experience, allowing her to combine creativity and programming with open-source tools. Gem will be working with OTI’s Measurement Lab project (M-Lab), the planet’s largest open platform for network measurement tools for testing everything from network speed and latency to blocking and throttling. She will be working closely with the team, as well as the cohort of Ford/Mozilla Open Web Fellows to build innovative tools for collecting and visualizing data from a variety of sources to learn more about data flows on the Internet and between Internet companies and governments.

Gem will also be working on transparency reporting  –  helping to build out the Transparency Reporting Toolkit. The Toolkit is intended to help identify, standardize and promote the best practices in Internet company transparency reporting on surveillance and censorship, both to encourage the practice of such reporting and to make the results of those reports more consistent so that they can be more easily compared, combined, and put to use as meaningful metrics. Gem will help to build an online portal that promotes standardized transparency reporting and that can serve as a public repository for report data that has been normalized into a standard format, which will allow for easy comparison while encouraging the spread and adoption of best practices in transparency reporting.

We can’t wait to welcome Gem to OTI this week and we’ll be regularly sharing Gem’s work, so check back often!

You can learn more about the Mozilla-Ford Open Web Fellows and their collaboration at https://advocacy.mozilla.org/open-web-fellows/.