The Opscientia Open Web Fellowship is a 12-week program that provides a stipend for talented undergraduates, students, and post-doctoral scholars to work on open source software development and basic research that aligns with the Opscientia mission.
Fellows must submit a proposal for review with a detailed problem statement, solution, plan of execution, and timeline for their project. Mentors may work with applicants to help them prepare their proposal. Selected projects will receive continued mentorship through weekly check-ins, performance review, and code review to help fellows approach milestones in their development timeline.
We're building a community-owned decentralised science (DeSci) tech stack to power a self-sustaining endowment for autonomous knowledge factories and a permanent immutable archive of discovery
Our mission is to provide all the tools required for anyone, anywhere, to launch a laboratory, conduct ethical scienctific research and contribute to a repository of reproducible workflows for knowledge creation.
We’re a community of science activists, researchers, organisers and enthusiasts that have come together to work on the problems of data sharing, reproducibility, incentive alignment, coordination, and intellectual ownership that plague knowledge creation today.
We're developing solutions to address the following categorical problems in scientific research today:
- Equal-access repositories for scientific data storage (public science commons) (decentralised / maintained)
- Equitable & secure access to cloud services for resource-intensive computation on Big Data
- Permanent content-addressable links to important scientific knowledge
- Integration of scientific standards for reporting, sharing, with inter-linked metadata
- Open real-time collaboration & feedback (peer review at every step)
- Contribution tracking & notarisation of scientific discovery
- Alternative outcome metrics for researcher success to inform funding mechanisms
- Incentives for mentorship as reputation metrics
- Multi-agent modeling for self-sustaining communities through aligned incentive + value creation feedback loops
*Don't see your favorite systemic science problem here? Email us at contact@opscientia.com to tell us what you should add, or post your experience on twitter with the #behindthebench tag"
The Opscientia Open Web Fellowship has several goals:
- Inspire trainees to participate in open source development
- Contribute to existing open source projects and bring new developers into the decentralized science ecosystem
- Provide continuous academic training during instructional or career transition gaps
- Give fellows experience working on real-world software development challenges
- Contribute to DAO services that grow and nourish the community
- Fellows are expected to submit quality work, dedicating a minimum of 20 hours per week for the duration of the fellowship
- Provide regular updates on completed work, status updates on upcoming deliverables, and notification of any obstacles or barriers
- Utilize official communication channels to request help
- Provide early notification for vacations, reduced hours, or capacity
- Respond to feedback and requests
Undergraduates, graduates, and post-graduate students with a gap in instructional continuity or the next stage in their training / career looking for experience working on real world knowledge and software problems. Individuals without post-secondary or formal academic training will be considered equally and assessed on the quality of the proposal.
Technological anthropoligists, user experience researchers, front/back-end developers, computational scientists, behavioral psychologists and economists are encouraged to apply.
We are a decentralised community seeking to capture the diversity of knowledge creators and curious finders all over the world. We particularly encourage applicants that are under-represented in science and technology.
Not sure if you should apply? Hop on our discord or send an email to contact@opscientia.com
Applicants must construct a proposal by:
- First forking the Open Web Fellowship Proposal repository to your personal account. This will let you make changes on your own version of the repository.
- Create a folder under submissions and title it
name-quarter-year-category. Next copyopen-web-fellowship-template.md, and rename the file asname-quarter-year-category.md. Valid categories arecloud-services,semantic-web,token-communities,other. - Fill in your project, delete the filler text and submit a pull-request. The team will review this for basic information and will merge it with the repository when it passes basic quality checks.
- Post your proposal on the Opscientia DAO Governance Forum in the #open-web-fellowship category for feedback from the community on clarity, alignment with the Opscientia Mission, execution plan, and feasibility.
A period is provided for feedback and refining the proposal. Final evaluation is performed over a voting period by the Opscientia DAO. The top proposals are selected based on the amount of funding available for the current cycle of applications. Fellows with a positive history with the DAO may qualify for higher funding levels for their project.
⭐️ Applications are rolling through 2021. Submit now 🍴
Please help improve this application! All contributions are welcome and will be credited. Here are some ways you can help out!
If you spot an error (e.g., typo, bug, inaccurate descriptions, etc.), or have an idea about how this application can be better please open a new issue on GitHub by clicking on the GitHub Icon in the top right corner on any page and selecting "open issue".
Please notify us if we have inadvertently omitted credit for any content generated by others.
As part of the open science community, all contributors must promote and advocate inclusivity through a welcoming environment, giving voice to underrepresented and marginalized people, and creating means and tools in building up a healthy community. Any contributors should please adhere to the following (adapted from the Contributor Covenant, version 2.0 and Mozilla's code of conduct):
I pledge to make participation a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of age, body size, visible or invisible disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, level of experience, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, caste, color, religion, or sexual identity and orientation. I also pledge to act and interact in ways that contribute to an open, welcoming, diverse, inclusive, and healthy community."