The Open Web Fellows program – a collaboration between Ford Foundation and Mozilla – is an international leadership initiative that brings together technology talent and civil society organizations to advance and protect the open Web.

We are super pleased to announce that Data & Society is one of eight host organizations for this second year of the Open Web Fellows program.

And what an incredible eight: Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law—Nairobi, Kenya; The Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto—Toronto, Canada; ColorOfChange.org—New York, NY; Data & Society—New York, NY; Derechos Digitales—Santiago, Chile; European Digital Rights (EDRi)—Brussels, Belgium; Freedom of the Press Foundation—San Francisco, CA; and Privacy International—London, United Kingdom.

At D&S we’re working to identify key issues resulting from emerging data/tech. Our goal is to ensure that public conversations around these issues are grounded in research. Our mode is both to develop projects and events that can increase understanding and to build a network of researchers and practitioners to help us collectively think and respond.

Do you care about automation and intelligent systems? fairness and civil and human rights? data in learning? the future of labor? privacy and surveillance? or network infrastructures? These are some of our intertwined initiatives, and the open Web runs through all of them.

The Open Web Fellow in residence at D&S will be doing work in dialogue with our initiatives and our community. We are especially keen to host someone deeply versed in technical conversations (geek, hacker, data scientist, systems architect, machine learninger, etc.). We see an enormous need to bring technical clarity to discussions around the social disruptions of data-centric technologies. Ideally, we’ll host someone who can translate technical understandings for different audiences and help to raise the technical knowledge and capacity of the network we’re building.

What’s in it for you? You will be challenged by a passionate, multidisciplinary community of researchers, practitioners, and mischief makers at D&S (and also by your fellow Ford-Mozilla fellows). Your work will be shared broadly with a view to influencing public (and policy) conversations, directly and indirectly. Your time at D&S will be good preparation for future projects in similarly constituted organizations. And, we believe, you’ll have fun.

Tons more information about the program, plus application details, can be found here. Please apply!