🔹 The Core Internet Values Observatory (CIVOBS)
Purpose
The Core Internet Values Observatory (CIVOBS) is a global, open, and community-driven initiative that systematically tracks and analyzes developments affecting the Internet’s core values.
CIVOBS examines how laws, regulations, technical and standards decisions, platform practices, outages, and security events strengthen or erode the Internet’s openness, interoperability, resilience, and user-centric nature.
Developed in partnership with the IGF Dynamic Coalition on Core Internet Values, the Observatory is grounded in WSIS-aligned principles while remaining independent, non-partisan, and evidence-based.
What CIVOBS Does
CIVOBS functions as:
- A live observatory of threats and enablers affecting Core Internet Values
- A global repository of cases, trends, and comparable data
- A decision-support resource for policymakers, the technical community, academia, civil society, and the private sector
- A bottom-up platform for global participation and verification
Rather than prescribing outcomes, CIVOBS provides a shared, auditable evidence base to support informed dialogue, early warning, and preventive governance.
What It Tracks & How It Works
CIVOBS records and classifies key signals, including:
- Regulatory and legal actions
- Standards and protocol developments
- Platform and infrastructure policy changes
- Network disruptions and security incidents
Signals are assessed against a transparent framework covering Core Internet Values such as access, interoperability, openness, decentralization, robustness, and user-centricity.
Using an open and auditable methodology, CIVOBS produces:
- Open datasets
- Visual dashboards and timelines
- A CIVOBS Index tracking the health of Core Internet Values
- Short analytical case briefs on high-impact developments
Why It Matters
While technically grounded, CIVOBS has a broad societal impact. Internet fragmentation and value erosion affect digital trade, research and innovation, civic space, human rights, and global resilience.
By making these impacts visible and comparable, CIVOBS supports early warning, shared understanding, and preventive action, reinforcing the Internet as a global public good in line with WSIS+20 priorities.
An open, global observatory tracking how policy and infrastructure decisions shape the Internet’s core values.
🔹 Digital Mobilization and the Participation Paradox
Purpose
Examines a central paradox of the digital age: expanded digital activism without corresponding participation in formal democratic and governance processes.
Key problem
Digital platforms amplify expression and mobilization, yet:
- Institutional trust often declines
- Electoral and procedural participation stagnates
- Engagement remains episodic rather than durable
What we study
- Why digital engagement fails to convert into institutional participation
- When digital participation strengthens legitimacy—and when it fragments it
- How platforms, institutions, and governance design interact
Comparative focus
- Chile
- Mexico City
- Iceland
- Global multistakeholder institutions and platforms (including ICANN)
Outcome
Evidence-based insights to improve participatory design, legitimacy, and inclusion across local, national, and global governance contexts—aligned with WSIS goals of people-centered governance.
🔹 Civic Technopolitics & Participatory Digital Governance
Purpose
Explores how cities and local institutions adapt governance as digital systems and data-driven decision-making become embedded in public administration.
Areas of focus
- Participatory and hybrid digital-democracy models
- Public oversight of administrative and decision-support technologies
- Rights-based approaches to data and service delivery
- Institutional trust and accountability at the local level
Approach
Drawing on comparative learning—including insights from New York City’s civic-centered digital governance experience—the initiative emphasizes adaptation over replication.
Relevance
Contributes to WSIS+20 discussions on capacity building, institutional adaptation, and local implementation of global digital principles.
🔹 Diplomacy, Trade, and Platform Regulation
Purpose
Addresses the growing tendency to reframe platform regulation as trade conflict, with significant geopolitical and governance consequences.
Context
Divergent platform-regulation regimes are increasingly treated as:
- Trade barriers
- Grounds for retaliation
- Drivers of Internet and market fragmentation
Focus areas
- Misalignment between regulatory intent and trade interpretation
- Risks of escalation and regulatory chilling effects
- Lack of shared analytical language across policy communities
Method
- Quiet, credibility-based research
- Track 1.5 dialogue formats
- Shared frameworks and non-papers
Objective
Not advocacy or negotiation, but stabilization, interpretation, and institutional learning, supporting cooperative digital governance consistent with WSIS+20 priorities.
🔹 Understanding China: Strategy, Power, and Global Impact
Purpose
Centers on a forthcoming book by Pari Esfandiari and Gregory Treverton, Unveiling the Dragon: China’s Strategic Evolution and Global Impact.
Scope
- Governance and political strategy
- Technology and AI ambition
- Digital governance and cyber policy
- Military modernization and economic statecraft
- China’s role in global and multilateral institutions
Contribution
Provides a non-reductionist, analytically rigorous understanding of China at a time of heightened geopolitical tension—supporting informed dialogue rather than narrative fragmentation.
🔹 An Evolving Portfolio of Initiatives
Forward-looking work
In addition to active initiatives, GTPF is developing projects addressing:
- Digital sovereignty
- Artificial intelligence governance
- Security and resilience
- The future of multistakeholder models
GTPF has already undertaken substantial analytical and convening work on AI and multistakeholder governance, which informs these emerging initiatives.
How we work
Initiatives are incubated rather than rushed. Projects may be launched, concluded, merged, or reframed as technologies evolve and governance needs change.
What unites our work
- Independence and analytical rigor
- Multistakeholder cooperation without capture
- Bridging dialogue and implementation
- Reinforcing digital governance as a global public good