# Wanted: A Dashboard for Internet Citizenship

By [The Slow Hunch by Nick Grossman](https://paragraph.com/@nickgrossman) · 2013-02-19

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One thing I’ve wanted for a long time now is a dashboard that helps me track the wide array of tech policy issues I follow. One place where I could check, every morning, to get a sense of what issues are trending & developing, what longer-term issues are brewing, what specific milestones are approaching, and what opportunities there might be for me to get engaged. Something akin to [Techmeme](http://techmeme.com) + [Crunchbase](http://crunchbase.com), but focused on policy issues.   I’ve been thinking of this as a “dashboard for internet citizenship”. Here’s what I do, in the absence of such a thing. I read [Techdirt](http://techdirt.com) and Ars Technica’s [Law & Disorder](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy) religiously, and I keep an ever-growing [Google Reader feed](http://theslowhunch.net/post/39768153181/my-public-folders-on-google-reader) that tracks tech policy thinkers.  And all of this is great. But what I really want is something a bit more structured — that breaks issues down by sector & type (e.g., copyright vs. transportation vs. international, etc.), and understands things like timelines, which are particularly important with policy issues (and which are constantly changing).  And I want something that spans many sources, and is peer produced and peer curated. Last year, I started to prototype a take on this, which I dubbed “Threat Vector” — a simple site for tracking issues and topics, and associating them with news stories:

![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/f8055448325e71d7f2612ff578d129e9.png)

A demo is running [here](http://threatvector.connected.io) (code [here](https://github.com/connectedio/netizen.io))- but it’s been sitting in half-baked form for several months now, which is a shame.  I also spent some time last year sketching out a more involved idea for a [social network for tech policy](https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1sz_fbd7mZYe3eny9mMdt-Qv7xF8MavTNfOvbpGcdflQ#), which I could see as growing out of a simpler starting point like Threat Vector. I really want something like this. I’ve taken a few half-starts at it, and have a ton of ideas about how it might work, but haven’t really focused on it.  Maybe there is something like it out there on the web already, but I haven’t found it yet.  Something like this would make a great addition to the [Internet Defense League](http://internetdefenseleague.org). If anyone is interested in taking this on in some form, I’d be happy to help make it happen.

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*Originally published on [The Slow Hunch by Nick Grossman](https://paragraph.com/@nickgrossman/wanted-a-dashboard-for-internet-citizenship)*