The International Digital Policy Observatory (IDPO) is a publicly accessible, real-time database with enhanced analytical tools that tracks developments in digital, internet, and emerging technology regulation across multiple countries. The purpose of this infrastructure is to shape innovative policy search and analysis techniques concerning multifaceted regulation, policies, and governance across our digital society and economy. Through the development of such an enabling infrastructure, policy makers, industry stakeholders, and civil society advocacy groups will be able to draw upon a ‘common pool’ resource to better understand and respond to international trends in the tech policy arena. The IDPO seeks to place Australia at the forefront of policy and regulatory debates globally.

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 (IDPO) mission is to enable best practice digital policy regulation by sharing insights from around the globe through open and freely available online resources.

IDPO key objectives include:
• Augmenting topic-specific policy/regulatory 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. visualisations, such as policy networks and timelines).
• 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.

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.