Internet Impact Assessment Toolkit > Internet Impact Assessment Checklist

Internet Impact Assessment Checklist

A step-by-step guide to conducting an Internet Impact Assessment.

You can use the Internet Way of Networking and the Internet enablers to do a holistic analysis of a policy or trend. Use this checklist to plan and organize your work.

Document what you already know

Once you’ve identified the policy or trend you want to analyze, start by writing down what you know already, even if it’s an assumption. Review some Internet Impact Briefs to see what’s been done before. This will help you start a conversation with whoever you need to work with.

Use the planning guide to align on your agenda

What are you looking to get out of this? You might want to stop a bad policy, encourage a positive one, influence public opinion, or check a policy for potential harm to the Internet. Use the Plan Your Impact Assessment worksheet or discussion guide to set your agenda.

Gather your collaborators and agree on the work

You’ll need policy and technical expertise, as well as someone who really understands the local context. It also helps to have people with facilitation and communication skills. Use the Kickoff worksheet to plan your work together.

Make sure everyone is familiar with the Internet Way of Networking

The Internet Way of Networking describes the characteristics and conditions that the Internet needs to exist as a set of practices. The technical and policy experts should go deepest, but the rest of the group should have at least some understanding. Go to the Learning page to find resources.

Do a preliminary analysis with the Internet Impact Assessment table

This will help you make sure you’ve covered all the issues, and give you something to compare with the assumptions you made in the first step of this list. Depending on your impact goals, you might decide this is where your analysis work ends.

Validate your analysis with an expert from the Internet Society

Contact us so we can help you validate what you’ve learned. We have a dedicated email address that’s monitored by our internal experts on the Internet Way of Networking.

Write a one-page summary

Create a brief introduction to the local context for your analysis, and use the text from your preliminary analysis to create a short summary version that you can share with others, or use for whatever comes next.

Write an Impact Brief or create your impact work

Adapt your summary for your audiences. It could be a campaign, an open letter or editorial, or talking points for a meeting with a government official. You might decide you need a full Internet Impact Brief. You’ll find tips in our full guide to writing an Impact Brief.

Share your results with the Internet Society

Even if you’ve just done an analysis as an exercise, we’d love to know. It helps us keep track of the policies and trends that our community has noticed around the world. Use this short form to submit your assessment work to our Internet Impact Database.