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 five anchor organizations (returning host organizations) for this third year of the Open Web Fellows program; plus, there are seven new host orgs!

And what an incredible cohort: Privacy International (London); Citizen Lab (Toronto); Derechos Digitales (Santiago); Freedom of the Press Foundation (San Francisco); Bits of Freedom (Amsterdam); Brooklyn Public Library (Brooklyn); Hollaback! (Brooklyn); Majal (Mexico); MPower Change (New York); Research ICT Africa (Cape Town); and Human Rights Watch (New York).

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. We both develop projects and events that can increase understanding, and build a network of researchers and practitioners to help us collectively think and respond.

The Open Web Fellow in residence at D&S will be doing work in dialogue with our initiatives and our community. Do you care about automation and intelligent systems? the future of labor? media manipulation? fairness and civil and human rights? data in learning? privacy and surveillance? or network infrastructures? These are some of our intertwined initiatives, and the open Web runs through all of them.

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 and here. Please apply!