The Berkman Klein Centre for Internet & Society at Harvard University has opened the application for the fellowship. This opportunity is for those who wish to spend 2019-2020 in residence in Cambridge, MA as part of the Center’s vibrant community of research and practice, and who seek to engage in the collaborative, cross-disciplinary, and cross-sectoral exploration of some of the Internet’s most important and compelling issues.

Applications will be accepted until Friday, January 18, 2019, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time.

The Berkman Klein Center’s mission is to explore and understand cyberspace; to study its development, dynamics, norms, and standards; and to assess the need or lack thereof for laws and sanctions.

The Berkman Klein Centre’s fellowship program provides an opportunity for some of the world’s most innovative thinkers and change makers to come together to hone and share ideas, find camaraderie, and spawn new initiatives. The program encourages and supports fellows in an inviting and playful intellectual environment with community activities designed to foster inquiry and risk-taking; to identify and expose common threads across fellows’ individual activities; and to bring fellows into conversation with the students, staff, faculty, and broader community at the Berkman Klein Centre. From their diverse backgrounds and wide-ranging physical and virtual travels, Berkman Klein Centre fellows bring fresh ideas, skills, passion, and connections to the Centre and our community, and from their time spent in Cambridge help build and extend new perspectives and actions back out into their home networks, communities, and fields.

Fellows appointed through this open call come into their fellowship with a personal research agenda and set of ambitions they wish to conduct while at the Centre. These might include focused study or writing projects, action-oriented meetings, and the development of a set of technical tools, capacity building efforts, testing different pedagogical approaches, or efforts to intervene in public discourse and trailing new platforms for exchange. Over the course of the year fellows advance their research and contribute to the intellectual life of the Centre and fellowship program activities; as they learn with and are influenced by their peers, fellows have the freedom to change and modify their plans.

In addition to each fellow’s personal research agenda, together fellows actively design and participate in weekly all-fellows sessions, working groups, skill shares, hacking and development sessions, and shared meals, as well as join in a wide-range of Berkman Klein Centre events, classes, brainstorms, interactions, and projects. While engaging in both substance and process, much of what makes the fellowship program rewarding is created each year by the fellows themselves to address their own interests and priorities. These entrepreneurial, collaborative ventures – ranging at once from goal-oriented to experimental, from rigorous to humorous – ensure the dynamism of a fellowship experience, the fellowship program, and the Berkman Klein community. As well, the Centre works to support our exemplary alumni network, and beyond a period of formal affiliation, community members maintain ongoing active communication and mutual support across cohorts.