International Digital Policy Observatory Project

The International Digital Policy Observatory (IDPO) is a semi-automated and collaboratively curated database which enables users to discover digital policy insights from around the world to advance multi-stakeholder knowledge-sharing.

It is designed for academics, regulators, industry, advocacy groups, and their advisors.

Five topics were selected for the IDPO’s ‘antenna’ scope: Misinformation, AI Regulation, Cybersecurity, Digital Identity, and Online Content Regulation.

These topics reflect policy priorities communicated across a range of multi-governance levels: supranational, intergovernmental, national, subnational, and civil society.

The IDPO can therefore enable diverse stakeholders to not only track and respond to topic-specific governance developments - but also to proactively learn how different jurisdictions and sectors are shaping technological and regulatory innovations around the globe.

This project is funded by a 2023 Australian Research Council Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities (LIEF) grant which provides funding for research infrastructure, equipment, and facilities.

The IDPO is led by Professor Terry Flew with a team of interdisciplinary researchers from University of Sydney, UNSW, and UTS. A key project partner is the Australian Information Industry Association.

This multi-university consortia and industry partnership has built the IDPO to place Australia at the forefront of regulatory best practice in the digital economy. 

The project team brings a unique interdisciplinary perspective to the development of the International Digital Policy Observatory.

Based at three leading Australian research universities, it includes internationally-recognised leaders in digital media studies, media and communications policy, and media and communications law.

It has leading researchers in communications and media studies, law, business, social sciences, data science and digital cultures. Key team personnel include Senior Research Associate Dr Rob Nicholls, Data Scientist Justin Miller, and Project Manager Dr Teresa Swist.

The IDPO augments topic-specific policy search results with corresponding news, academic literature, grey literature (e.g. reports, blogs), plus user-generated content (e.g. podcasts, videos).

This platform is being developed as a sustainable, scalable foundation for an open-source, semi-automated database.

To do so, we are building the IDPO with Datopian's CKAN open data management team which supports data democratisation around the globe.

A particularly unique aspect of the IDPO is an interactive dashboard which enables users to engage with topics and data sources via various tools – such as semantic maps, wordclouds, and timelines.

Current IDPO data sources include: news (GDELT), academic research (Semantic Scholar), user-generated content (Spotify, YouTube), and a range of publicly sourced bills, laws, regulations, and policymaking outputs.

A unique aspect of the IDPO data curation process involves members of our interdisciplinary team co-curating IDPO data in relation to their regulatory and policy expertise for a particular topic.

Dr Rob Nicholls and Professor Derek Wilding have been collaborating with data scientist Justin Miller to sculpt and refine IDPO data for the Misinformation topic.

This participatory process involves identifying, testing and applying specific parameters (e.g. keywords, date and time, location, filetype, and document type) pertaining to a particular bill, law, regulation etc.

• Augmenting topic-specific policy search results with corresponding news, academic and grey literature, plus user-generated content.
• Engaging diverse users with both trustworthy policy insights and varied resources (e.g. semantic map, wordcloud, and timeline visualisations).
• Linking to the interdisciplinary expertise of IDPO chief investigators via data sculpting/curation, Q&As, regular newsletters.
• Developing a sustainable, scalable foundation for an open-source and semi-automated database supplemented with interactive resources.
• Being collaboratively curated by Australian research experts for multi-stakeholder policy learning and knowledge-sharing.