Greetings!
Yesterday we did a small OONI workshop in Rome to focus on thinking about the problem of data visualization.
I think what came out of it is very useful, though it is not yet some fancy graphics visualizations. The main value comes from having some people that have very little prior knowledge of OONI think about the problem of data visualization and learn from them what is their framework of thinking.
One of my personal favorite takeaways is that when we think about the results of OONI what we should be talking about are "network irregularities". In the end what we are interested in spotting are deviations from what is to be considered a "normal" network behavior. This may or may not be a symptom of internet censorship. It could also be caused by some mess-up by the network operator or some bugs in our monitoring software.
The point is that when we spot an irregularity we should investigate it further to discover if it is in fact an instance of censorship or something else.
Starting from this assumption we started designing what should be the variables that a user interested in analyzing the data collected so far should be adjusting. We set our target audience to be somebody that is interested in integrating the data into some work they are doing. What came up often as a practical example of this is "the journalist working on an article on freedom of expression in country X".
At the end of the day we came up with this chart that shows what are the variables that should be combined together to produce different views:
https://people.torproject.org/~art/ooni/ooni-workshop-0x02-irregularities.pn...
What basically happens here is that the user fixes the timeframe they are interested in looking at. Once that is set they will be able to say "Show me all the _interesting_ measurements that are related to the country|test_name|input X".
I think that now Viviana and Silvia have a clearer understanding of how OONI works and what it's measuring and they will be working on producing some mockups of UIs for exploring the data in this way. I will then implement these mockups based on the new REST API we have to the data.
If you have questions on feedback on this it's greatly appreciated so please contribute to either this thread or post on this ticket: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13731
Have fun!
~ Arturo