 Oh, Tony, did you just start the recording? Okay, okay, no, huh? It may have auto-done it. Oh, okay. You know, oh, it looks like we have some people here. All right, I think we are live. We are. All right, we are live. So welcome, everybody. Welcome to the Rebooting Social Media RSM Assembly Fellowship Info Session. And we're gonna give it just a couple more minutes as a few more people trickle in. So feel free to grab your glasses if you need them to read slides, grab a glass of water, take a look out the window, a deep breath as you like. And we will be kicking things off in about 90 seconds. Welcome, welcome to those of you just joining. So this session is being recorded. For those of you who are just arriving, we wanna let you know this session is being recorded so that we can share it on our website for those folks who couldn't make the info session. However, since it is a webinar, it will not be recording you. We will not share your names. If you have questions, we will just respond to your questions as best we can. And in the spirit of honoring folks' privacy, sometimes it's a little jarring when you hear something is being recorded when you join but it's not recording you, it's just recording us. So with that, we're gonna kick things off. We'll start with doing some introductions to our team and then we're gonna show you some slides, give you a big picture overview of what it is we're up to and then mostly focus on the questions you all have for us. So with that, I will pass it over to my colleague Joanne Chung to introduce herself and we'll go around our virtual room here. Hi, everybody. My name is Joanne Chung. My pronouns are she, her. I used to be a workman client fellow back in 2017, 2018 and super excited to be working with this wonderful team organizing the Institute for Rebooting Social Media Assembly Fellowship. So welcome everybody, Tony. Hi, my name is Tony Gardner. She, her pronouns and I am the program coordinator for the Institute for Rebooting Social Media. Back up. Hi, everyone. Good to be with you all. Becca Tabaschi, she, her pronouns. I'm the director of community at the Berkman Client Center. Have the great privilege of working with a bunch of maniacs together under this roof and really excited about the prospects and the opportunities that this new Rebooting Social Media Fellowship program will hold for us. Great, and I am Sarah Newman. I go by Newman, which is my surname and I use she, her pronouns. I'm one of the senior advisors to the Institute and a staff member at the Berkman Client Center and the director of art and education at MetaLab at Harvard. And we are just being joined by one of the Institute PIs, which is terrific. Hi, this is an exercise in student enmity. Just given my Zoom identifier. I'm changing your name now for you, Jonathan. We're just doing intros. Well, don't let me interrupt. Oh, so that is me. And we've just gone around the room. So Professor Jonathan Zitron has just arrived. So we'll just pass it to you for a quick intro and then we're gonna talk a bit about what RSM is, which we'll pass back. Oh, hello. I'm a sometime user of social media that is starting to get the impression that maybe it's not all consistently terrific. And I've taught on internet architecture and governance and the shape and trajectory of new technologies for a number of years and I'm particularly interested in the ways in which the kind of structured and rigorous thinking of academia and openness to changing one's mind can itself be reflected in social media and the ways in which we can structure our Institute to really draw in people who don't formally identify all the time as academics to broaden the base of work and ideas and reach of what we can do in the public interest. And in that sense, I'm particularly thrilled to be here for this. And do you know, is our colleague James Mickens somewhere to be found? Maybe he, I could just send along the link that I used and Joanne could appear a third time. Maybe I'll do that. Oh, you just did that. Okay, great. Great, so Mickens is just gonna be joining us momentarily. And with that, we would like to just introduce a little bit more about what this Institute is. So you all came to us from different places. You're probably joining from all around the world, which is really exciting. So thanks to those of you who are joining in the middle of the night, as it may be in your time zone. The Institute for Rebooting Social Media is part of the larger Berkman Klein Center. Jonathan is one of the co-founders of the Berkman Klein Center and he can speak more to that. But today's session, if you wanna go to the next slide, please will be specifically focused on the RSM Assembly Fellowship. And we're going to be talking about the timeline, some logistics, the criteria for applicants, and also some example projects. And as I said earlier, we're gonna spend the majority of the time trying to answer your questions. Before we proceed, however, we would like to introduce Professor James Mickens, who's the co-PI of the Institute, who's just joining us. And Mickens, if you don't mind just saying hello to folks, I will turn it over to you while I also change your name. Sounds good. Well, glad to see so many of you in this wondrous virtual universe that we've created. So yeah, I'm one of the faculty co-directors for the Institute. My background is in computer science. So I worked at Microsoft Research for seven years before I came over to Harvard, where I became a professor of computer science. And I'm really excited to work with the Institute for Rebooting Social Media to sort of gather folks from a variety of backgrounds to tackle some of the important problems in this space. And as I'm sure we'll hear throughout this session, one of the things that we're really excited about for the fellowship program is to bring together a bunch of folks who will be generative, who will create some concrete artifacts, whether they be prototypes or policy documents or things like that, that will really try to move the needle in the short to medium term in terms of making the world of online social discourse better for everyone. And so I can also speak a little bit more broadly about some of the pillars that we at the Institute are trying to focus on. And so if we can go to the next slide. Great, thank you so much. So here we have a wall of text. So don't worry about reading at all. Let me give you a high level overview of what we're trying to do with the Institute. As I sort of alluded to earlier, we're looking for people who want to be generative, who want to do stuff. And so broadly speaking, there are three pillars that we're interested in, three sort of areas of specific focus that we want to look at with the fellowship program that we'll be talking about today. So the first pillar is what we call technology and policy development. And so here, this is leaning a lot on these ideas that I mentioned earlier of being generative and creating tangible ideas and prototypes. This could be code, software that somehow, for example, reduces the amount of online harassment that you might see in online social media. That makes it easier to identify instances of misinformation. So there's software artifacts that would fall under this first pillar. There's also policies that might fall under this first pillar. So in other words, we would see it as very beneficial if a fellow's could come in and talk about concrete ways forward to define, for example, better ways of interaction between industry and between legislatures or civil society. We'd also consider tools, sort of frameworks that are concrete that might help, for example, people inside of companies to better respond to the needs of users who are outside of the company, things like that. So anyway, so pillar run, that's technology and policy development. Now pillar two, we call that analysis and theory. And so the basic idea here is that fellows who would come and work under this pillar would really help us to understand the basic underpinnings of how digital social spears operate. As it turns out, understanding how online social media operates is very complicated. We had a workshop in the fall where we looked at online social media through the lens of crisis science. Crisis science is something like environmental science or something like conservation biology, how do we preserve endangered species? And so in both of those cases, conservation biology and climate science, we have these really complex systems that we're trying to understand. We don't fully have a grapple on how they operate and yet there is a lot of urgency to try to address the problems of, for example, endangered species or climate change because the harms that will arise if we don't deal with these things are very severe and very damaging. So in pillar two, we wanna bring in people who are going to look at sort of these basic principles that govern how people and algorithms and platforms interact with each other. So example outputs from this particular pillar might be academic papers, but also public-facing things like op-eds, other types of public writing, having public events where we convene actual users or people from civil society to talk about the impact that social media has on us all. And so I wanna mention that even in this pillar, analysis and theory, that sounds, at first glance, perhaps very, very hands-off and very abstract, but as you'll see in the example outputs, we really do want people who work on this pillar to also be generative and to also have outputs that are public-facing. And so then finally, if we look at pillar three, so pillar three, we call building the field. And so pillar three is gonna focus specifically on building interest and expertise among students and professionals who hopefully will later on go work on social media in some capacity, whether they go to the social media companies themselves or maybe they try to improve social media from the outside as an ethnographer, as a politician, as an activist. But we wanna sort of provide venues for these folks to talk about these pressing issues, to exchange ideas and to try to build a community of folks who want to improve the online social media ecosystem. And an important aspect of pillar three is that we wanna make sure that we're empowering voices that aren't traditionally heard from when we look at the study of online social media. We wanna make sure that we look at diversity, broadly writ, in terms of gender, religion, all these types of things. And we wanna make sure that we also have good coverage of different academic approaches towards understanding online social media. So example outputs for this pillar include various types of public events, conference write-ups, and maybe even curriculum for classes, right? So maybe even new ideas about how we should teach the sort of art and science of social media to students, not just in engineering classes. Of course, it's computer scientists who will build the infrastructure, but also in the fields of design or in the fields of public policy. We wanna make sure that we embed an understanding of how these social media ecosystems work across the curriculum. And so with that, I will now pass the baton over to Joanne. All right, thank you, Mickens. So everyone, as you know, as you see, this institute sits within grand ambitions. So there's a lot that we wish to change and change happens in a lot of different ways. But of course, in order to make change tactical, a fellowship structure, this fellowship structure is kind of very agile. It's six months. So, Tony, if you could go to the next slide, what I'll talk through is some of the backend stuff. So the application timeline, I'll talk through a little bit of the structure of the fellowship itself and also what we might be looking for. So all of this really is to create kind of a tactical structure in which a community of fellows can work together to make tangible and demonstrable progress. So in terms of the application timeline, you all know that the call was launched last week and May 6th will be the closing of the application. Then we will go through a brief review period and you should, for applicants, you should, offers should be received towards the end of May. So this is a pretty quick turnaround process for applications and for ones who've opened the application portal, you'll see that hopefully it should not be too overwhelming but our intention really is to help clarify what kinds of projects could be accomplished within this kind of structure. So we want to hold grand ambitions but we also want tactical progress. So the application itself, hopefully it will help tease out some of these details. So basically before the first week of June, we should have finalized our cohort and the fellowship itself will look to a kickoff in mid-October. So next slide, please. And in terms of the fellowship itself, it will be a hybrid fellowship running for six months with three periods in which folks are going to be together in person. So this will be a kickoff for one week in Cambridge in mid-October and a midpoint check-in in January and in early April, a one week final celebration. And then in the interim, it is our intention that we keep the momentum going. So there will be structured check-ins. There will be structured connections with the broader network of folks at Berkman Client Center and the broader network of folks working on rebooting social media, including our visiting scholars and as well as many other projects that are ongoing. So this is meant to be an expansion of everybody's networks to help boost understanding and make connections and cross-pollinate ideas. So all of this is to say, hopefully this is a flexible enough structure to make tangible progress and also be a bigger platform for exploring ideas. Next slide, please. So just to recap the logistics, it'll be a six months fellowship. It'll be part-time or defining that loosely. And I think the reason there is that we know every project is different and for projects that are ambitious, sometimes you need to, there will be surprises that come up. So we trust fellows to structure their time as they see fit. And so running from mid-October to April with three weeks in person in Cambridge, Massachusetts at Berkman Client Center itself and then the remainder hybrid. And so in terms of stipend, we have 18,000 available for all fellows if needed. And then also we understand that there's travel involved to be together in person to build communities. So we also are making a need-based travel assistance available and we can discuss that on a case-by-case basis. So overall, we're looking at a cohort of 12 to 15 assembly fellows. And so beyond the stipend and beyond the community of fellows and the BKC community. So there's also some additional university resources at Harvard itself to help with the work. So this includes workspace in the Berkman Client Center offices, library access. So this includes everything, journal subscriptions, things to help with, back-end research, potential audit courses. Since this is, if you're spending a lot more time in Cambridge, then this is something that you will be able to discuss on a case-by-case basis with professors themselves and would have to get their approval. And then of course, connections to visiting scholars who are part of the Rebooting Social Media Institute, Berkman Client Fellows at large, and also the Greater Harvard. So lots of great folks doing related work on this. Next slide, please. In a quick word on what we are looking for. So this is from our perspective and we're also looking to be surprised. So if there are things that you believe are, is really going to make a dent in this mission, then please tell us all about it in your application. So first of all, we're looking for uniqueness in that this is something that what you're proposing to do through this fellowship should be something that you can't do in another context so that we want the support through this fellowship and through the institute to be something that's going to create some unique impact. We're also looking for something that's well-scoped. So of course, this is a six-month fellowship and it's part-time. So we understand that you might be doing other things simultaneously. So what you're proposing to do should be right-sized for this structure and something that should be tangible should be produced by the end. So to the point of tangible outputs, is there something that will be completed and demonstrable by the end of the six months? Not to say that that thing is going to fix everything about our broken online information ecosystem, but nevertheless, it should be something that is very clearly demonstrating progress in the right direction. And then finally, future paths. So does your proposed project have a potential past to further develop beyond the fellowship? So it's not something that's going to wrap up and be all and all, but something that has a lot of potential that becomes something bigger. So with that, there's a couple more additional considerations that I'll pass to my colleague, Tony, to talk about. And I think we're already seeing some questions floating in through chat that might touch on some of this. So hopefully this will answer some of those questions too. Yes, so I'd like to just touch on a few more considerations. This is a professional level fellowship. So only professional level applicants are eligible. And this could, this can be people that are not full-time students, but if you are a full-time undergraduate, master's level or PhD student, you are unfortunately not eligible for this program. But we do have other programs that you may be interested in. In terms of international applicants, we work very closely with the Harvard International Office, Becca here, and a few other wonderful staff members at the Birkenstein Center. And this is to support visa paperwork for eligible international fellows. However, I will note that given the restrictive nature of the H1B sponsorship visa, we regretfully cannot accept H1B holders into the program at this time. Other visa types may or may not be eligible, but like I said, we work closely with the international office. And we can work to get that checked out for you. We also wanted to note that all participants will be required to sign a contributor license agreement or a CLA. And this will need to be signed by both you and your home institution in order to assign appropriate rights to the work that comes out of the program. Thank you. Great, so with that, Jonathan's attorney is gonna actually speak a bit more about some previous assembly projects. And I'd also like to ask those of you who can to try to put your questions into the Q&A tool. Even though I said both places were fine, I actually think the Q&A tool is better so that they don't get lost in the stream of Zoom chats, but we are attending to questions in both places. And over to Jonathan to talk about some previous projects. Thanks so much, Newman. So our program here inherits a lot of the momentum and the structure and the spirit behind a program called assembly. Assembly, I think lasted about five years in repeated iterations. And the idea of assembly was to allow people who aren't typically within academia to spend some time on a campus and with other folks thinking about the public interest around a given topic where the problems are thorny enough and the understanding about how to solve them is fuzzy enough. And the suspicion is that good solutions will require a lot of moving parts at one time across disciplines and sectors that pulling people together from different quarters maybe could make a difference. Past assemblies included topics such as the ethics and governance of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity. And as you can see from this slide, these are some projects that emerged from assembly driven nearly entirely by the participants who themselves had a mix of engineering, policy, product design, other sort of talents brought to the table. And as you can see, one of them is called AI Blind Spot. That is an example of a sort of runway that somebody typically on the consumer side at a company or institution is about to deploy some kind of machine learning understands that there could be some problems lurking and AI Blind Spot is at least able to take some of the known unknowns and help somebody on that consumer side walk through some of the biggest questions about the data they're about to feed into the model, the uses they have for it, et cetera, et cetera. And in fact, that implicates a project right next door to it on the slide which is the data nutrition project that Newman among others has been instrumental in and data nutrition says it's amazing that data sets get passed around like kind of Christmas fruit cakes and you inherit that data, you feed your model with it but have no particular idea of its limits, its biases, what's within it. And so DNP is designed to facilitate the labeling of a data set by the people who are first creating it or adapting it so that downstream users might have a better sense of what to expect and maybe Newman if there's anything you wanna add about it but that's an example of something that requires technical expertise and understanding of machine learning inputs and outputs and flaws and it requires a policy sense of what future regulation might ask for and typically regulators don't like to ask for the impossible. So to be able to demonstrate that it's possible to meaningfully label data as a way of then having regulators consider subsidies or requirements or other combinations of carrots and sticks to have people who are producing data that is being used in these systems think a little bit more about labeling it. For each of these projects, they're really exploring areas where there hasn't been a lot of activity and looking to raise the profile of the problem to hazard a solution to pilot it and then to see where it might go. And that's very much the spirit I think in which we hope you would take up some of the projects here. I think there's an enduring sense including around the future of social media that there's not a whole lot of reflective kind of supervision and thought around these things. And the solutions for many of the problems maybe not all of them aren't conceived of yet or written down and to have a group in the public interest however that is determined by each person really thinking through these problems in a supportive environment and an intellectually challenging environment. And in one that can help provide links as needed to industry, to government, to other academics. That's kind of what we're aiming for with this program and what assembly to my eye did so well. So maybe back to you, Newman. Great, thank you so much. Thank you so much, Jonathan. And just one last slide for you all here and then we're gonna go to your terrific questions that are streaming in through multiple channels. Tony, would you mind just taking us to the last slide please? Thank you. So just to sum up as and then we'll go into discussion with this esteemed panel of folks sitting beside me virtually. This is really prioritizing folks who have a professional interest in social media and stewarding a healthy online information ecosystem. Now you can be, it doesn't have to be specifically one of the terms that we've used on the call for applicants but if you're working in social media and you're doing this professionally or you care to be doing more of this professionally we would welcome an application from you. We're specifically prioritizing folks that already have a project in mind or already have a project underway so that during a six month part-time fellowship we can see the most impact from work and we've decided to prioritize for that as this is an urgent problem and we want to see a lot of impact in a short period of time during this pop-up institute. And of course we also are looking for expertise since it's a professional fellowship and that would include in whether it's technical engineering, policy work, building institutions, really thinking about what that means in this era that we're now living in. And if you also believe that you have something else that's another compelling reason or another compelling project that you would like to bring to us, please do apply. So with that we are going to, I think there's one more slide where you can find our contact information and there's also a general contact information on our institute website which we can also throw into the chat. And with that we will open it up to questions. So what I would suggest to my co-panelists here is that we take a look at the questions in the Q&A tool. I guess I can just MC here and maybe I'll take a look at the questions in the Q&A tool and then ask different folks to weigh in if that sounds good to everybody. For those of you who are having trouble accessing the Q&A tool on your interface if you're for example on a phone or something feel free to use the chat and we're doing our best to answer those as well. So the first question I would actually like to throw back to Professor Zitrin which is how, sorry, have any past fellows use the fellowship as a functional startup incubator? That is have any fellows founded startups to scale and expand the work product they created during the fellowship? That's a good question. I don't know that that's happened with assembly but there's no reason it couldn't or shouldn't that maybe it meshes a little bit with some of the licensing issues. Our kind of commitment is to the public domain and the free exchange of ideas and then if somebody wants to further run with the outputs of the program in some way whether it's for profit, not for profit, whatever it might be I think we'd be quite happy to see that happen. Great, thank you. I think the important thing is that this work is not gonna be owned and this is something that was mentioned previously this work will not be owned by your companies and this work would be intended to be for social good in the public domain and some capacity whether that spins into something else later it's not, the intellectual property will not be owned by your professional organization and that is paperwork that we need to make sure is signed by all fellows employers in advance. The next question I would like to turn over to Professor Mickens, how do we define social media? What about social media adjacent technologies like AI? I love getting these wide ranging philosophical questions it's what is the matrix, it's hard to say. So I think that we're taking a pretty broad view of what social media is very broadly speaking we're thinking of social media as online mechanisms that allow people who are possibly physically distant to communicate, to collaborate, to learn about news events to learn about other things that are happening sort of in real life and in virtual world. So if you think that what you're doing is sort of social media narrowly defined or social media adjacent, you should definitely apply. I think with respect to the particular topic of AI the goal of this particular fellowship is not to focus sort of on narrowly defined AI projects. So, if you have a specific burning desire to add more layers to neural nets don't let life change, go do it, embrace that fire but that's not probably appropriate for this fellowship. Now, if you have a way to, for example use machine learning to better understand misinformation online or things like that to better identify instances of abuse so that that abuse can be stopped. That's a great fit, right? So even if there would be sort of like a core AI focus if it relates in some way to online social media at large that's great, you should definitely apply. Great, thank you so much. Another question we have is about current employer what about if your future employer is different than your current employer what about students who are graduating in May and will be working in industry before October? So yeah, these are good questions. So the fellowship is not open to full-time students it is really geared for professionals. If you happen to be graduating in May and you will be a professional in your view by October then you are eligible to apply. I would specify in your application if you're between employers, if you're freelancer all of that stuff is fine you don't have to work for a company to be eligible we would like you to feel like you're mid or beyond, mid career or beyond that's really who this is geared toward. We have other programs that are geared towards more early career folks. So that is up to you to self-define but I would say yes, just give as much specificity as you can in your application. We have this follow-up question from the same person which is around public health and yes, of course, COVID is a legitimate concern and we are going to make good decisions responsible decisions based on how things are looking in October. We would not wanna put anybody at risk. Harvard has been extremely responsible in my view and very proactive in terms of making recommendations that are well suited to everybody's wellbeing. So of course we're gonna be sending out announcements in June and then we will make decisions as needed as the world changes and that's the reality that we live in now. So we have another question and maybe Joanne you would like to take this one. Is this program intended for non-academics or those in academia or those hoping to transition out of academia and interested in building practical applications of their research? Are those folks encouraged to apply? I think I would just reorient back to the pillars of this institute and what we wish to accomplish through the scholarship is really anchored in technology and policy development. And so what that means is using the structure to build tangible and demonstrable outputs. So this could be as Professor Mickin said earlier it could be code, it could be policy or it could be anything within that range of, it's hard to create any of these things within six weeks part-time, right? But it should be demonstrable parts of that so that it at least signals towards becoming something bigger. So I think in terms of your background to be able to do that, I think we are open-minded. So if you believe that your academic background gives you the kinds of knowledge to be able to do that and you also have the skills to work in technology and policy development we welcome your application. So we don't want to make requirements just in terms of what resumes look good on paper but we're really anchored towards the mission of the Institute. Great, thank you, Joanne. And I'm wondering if Professor Ditchin if you could give some examples some concrete examples of non-tangible outputs and specific examples of what you don't want. That sounds like the name of an eponymous memoir concrete examples of non-tangible outputs within book. Well, I mean, for assembly at least there was a project called Equalize which might even have been renamed since that started from the premise that it's all well and good that Twitter and Facebook for example, on social media happened to strip out any exif data which is to say metadata around photos that we're constantly posting that have the location of where the photo was taken like down to like two meter resolution. And like that just you take the photo with a smartphone that comes with the photo. And if that just got passed along with your tweet or your Instapost even if you had otherwise location turned off that'd be a huge privacy issue and it originally back in the day it was. And so it's just good corporate practice to strip that out. Now comes along something like Clearview AI that is scraping billions of images and associated tags off of social media against the terms of service of that social media and then turning around an offering to those who can pay for it a service to arbitrarily identify anyone in the world at any point if they've ever had their photo on social media. And that's like a disaster. I can't believe that is that is the state of things right now in 2022. So the Equalized Project experimented with so-called adversarial perturbations in machine learning as a way of adding a little fuzz to the photo not visible to the human eye but that greatly confuses a categorization engine like that of Clearview. And that project was with an eye not just towards having people have to run some software on their photos before they post them but as a demonstration so that platforms like Facebook and Twitter could responsibly as they do with exit data add that fuzzing to make the life of a Clearview a little bit harder. That's an example of a project that is a tangible output there was some running code that did the adversarial perturbation that was sensitive to some of the lowercase P political dynamics of trying to get the companies on board once it was demonstrated to kind of help their own customers privacy along a little bit. And that's an example of thinking about new institutions or institutional relationships for allocating responsibility for these big problems that nobody owns right now nobody is taking responsibility for owning them. So that to me is an example of an output sensitive to multiple moving parts that is both tangible and intangible and perhaps quite useful to the world. Yeah, and one thing I'll just add there really quickly in terms of like what is a non tangible output look like? Like what are we not looking like? It's kind of tricky, right? I think the way that we're thinking about it though is that we really want that the fellowship participants here to be generative and then not be doing like quote unquote just academic work. And I say this by the way as an academic so like I'm talking about sometimes the things that people in my spare do but for example things that we wouldn't be as excited about are very theoretical academic papers that don't have a lot of near term relevancy to the way that social media is currently used today. That's a fine output just in general we need sort of that type of research being done but I think we're looking for work that has a greater likelihood of being impactful in the short to medium term that's grounded in sort of current challenges that we have with respect to misinformation or online abuse or things like that. And that sort of is an artifact that other people in the field could look at and say that's great, it's very relevant right now I could pick this up or I could hand this to someone else and they could start running with this and start making a really impactful and fairly immediate change. Thanks so much. Becca would you mind speaking to the question around how does this fit into the broader family of the Berkman Klein Center programs and affiliations? Sure, thanks Newman. It's a great question because it's something that we are thinking a lot about too as the center develops new slates of programs new ways of bringing people together and new ways of fostering community. I think one of the greatest contributions that we make as a center is bringing people together in dialogue. And so the RSM assembly fellowships are definitely designed to be in conversation with broader parts of the Berkman Klein community. We will be having all community events where everybody will be put in touch. There will be different ways of asynchronously communicating through listservs and discussion boards and other stuff within the community internally. There are different types of interventions that we have at the center through working groups and discussion groups and people swinging through where we're gonna be working to invite all people who are under the umbrella at the Berkman Klein community and sort of mixing up ways that people can meet one another can share ideas, whether that's on a specific topic substantively or whether it's a specific mode or method or way that somebody does work. Those different ways of gathering are done here and we fully expect folks from the assembly fellowship to be participating in those things as well. And then finally, I think the broader Berkman Klein community is here and is around the world. And we always want to help to facilitate connections, ways of people helping one another. We're very privileged to be bringing together people who are generous and curious and who want to engage with one another. So that's definitely one of the benefits of being in the program and being part of the network and obligations. Thank you so much, Becca. Let's see. Given the interdisciplinary nature of our work our folks able to collaborate with colleagues within the cohort to bring projects to life. For example, our policy folks able to pair up with engineers within the cohort. If so, what would you expect to see an application to reflect this? Or is it expected that each individual will deliver one project? Many thanks. So we've had a number of questions along these lines and this is a departure from previous assembly fellowships. So it's good to note this. We are allowing, we are encouraging folks to apply as individuals with a project idea. Ideally something that is already somewhat underway and would really benefit from this six month fellowship and the platform that RSM and Harvard provides. That said, we all can't do everything. In some cases folks have teammates. We are only accepting individual applications. However, if you are accepted and you have others on your team that you might be working with, that's fine. You can be the representative and the fellowship of your team. To this question in particular, if you are working on a project and you have others within your cohort who have certain skills that maybe they can contribute. Absolutely, we encourage that's the benefit of doing something that's interdisciplinary is to allow this kind of cross-pollination. But different from previous assembly years we really are prioritizing in the spirit of impactful work that is going to make meaningful change in the world. Projects that already have some drive behind them and where you believe that you are able without meeting a team of folks that you're looking for within the fellowship to sort of execute on this. I'm not sure if that answers it fully. I'm not sure if others, Joanne maybe want to chime in here to clarify anything. Basically we don't know, we don't always know exactly what's gonna happen but we want you to come in with an idea that you feel confident that you can undertake. And then the magic of a fellowship happens and you meet amazing people and they help in unexpected ways but we're not designing for that. So if that makes sense. I think this is a, it's kind of a chicken and egg question, right? Like we wanna create the openness and the potential for great things to happen and those things could include serendipitous collaborations because we hope to recruit a cohort of amazing people. With that being said, showing up without an agenda tends to not produce good outcomes by the end of six months. So for folks who are coming in we intend for them to have a clear sense of roadmap of what they hope to do. And I think that also we hope will make it easier for finding collaborations and sparking collaborations. So not having anything carved in stone but we are very open. And again, I think our intent is to create demonstrable impact through this fellowship. So we're open to any and all ways to achieve that. Great, we have another question. I think Professor Zitran I'd like to turn this one to you. I work as an executive for a social media company. Does the project need to be collaborated with or deployed by our company and would use resources of the company? What or how would the agreement, the CLA with the company look like? Yeah, the CLA in the past for assembly has been intentionally quite simple and the kind of thing that is meant to sort of go down easy for a company that's like, what is this now? And having the company understand that this is really valuable professional development within their workforce and that it's an employee taking initiative. While sometimes it's taken a while to get the CLA's signed off upon because it goes through process at the respective companies I think they've always come through. I've never seen an instance in which it hasn't worked out but that's in part because the CLA is pretty simple and direct and for the clear purpose of being able to have kind of the way an attorney at a law firm might do pro bono work for the world. Okay, this is a section of the job that is pro bono for the benefit of the public. And that attorney might be using some of the resources of the law firm to do it. They're typing on a computer that's a work computer or using some element of legal research that is subsidized by the firm. And so similarly, there might be elements of that. The CLA is meant to say whatever is going through this program is something that is part of what goes to the world. So on the substance, if you're at a particular company your idea could be something that doesn't particularly implicate the company. Imagine you work one place but you're really into Wikipedia and you have some idea of how Wikipedia could have a content moderation system that et cetera, et cetera. And in that sense, I actually see Wikipedia itself as a form of social media taking Professor Mickens's broad view of what social media is. But you also might say, you know what? Within my company, if we were able to implement the following feature and at the same time, if we implemented this feature in our service or our software and there were somebody else that was able to do X and it was clear from a regulatory perspective that it wouldn't be stepping on any toes. Then that would be really cool. That's a project for which it would kind of be up to the participant to see what's the right amount of institutional commitment and buy-in to that idea before proposing it but being able just to test something out to play with it and then to figure out when does it become a pilot and when does that pilot become something aiming towards prime time? All of those are steps that might happen even after the fellowships happened. It would just in the application be good to say exactly where things stand and what your sense of your own project is. So it could be within the company, it could be outside of it. Great, thank you. We have about 10 more minutes. We're getting through as many of these as we can and thanks to you all for such terrific questions and to the panelists for these rapid-fire responses. Sorry about that. The next question I'd like to turn to Professor Mickens which is what is this perspective of RSM on boundary pushing work? For example, how would the institute respond to a project about the social norms behind nudity policies and algorithms and social media platforms? Specifically, my work asks questions about the impact of these models on the LGBTQ community, women and sex workers. So boundary pushing, what do we think about that? Great, I think we are plus one on that. I think that one of the big things that we wanna do with the institute is make sure that communities who have been traditionally sort of under focused upon don't try to do the sentence tree on that the grammars jacked out but people who have not been studied as extensively these people use social media too. And so I think it's actually something that we seek out to have sort of a broad portfolio of projects. Some of these projects may end up looking quote unquote very technical. Some may end up looking quote unquote very, very social science heavy and not focus as much on some of the nuts and bolts of how the packets get sent around the internet or things like that. But at a high level, I think we encourage proposals that will look at some underexplored areas of the social media space. So yeah, I think we would encourage you to apply. Great, thanks. Thank you, Professor Mickens. All right, Joanne, I'm gonna turn this one to you. The project I'm hoping to pitch is for a global self context that tends towards high touch and not high tech. It involves mentorship, low data is human and not data, sorry, it's human and not data centered and is focused around annotation using a fact checking framework. None of these words are used in the call. Does this still resonate? So I'll say two things. One is that projects like this certainly are important to improving the broader state of the global information ecosystem and social media. So I think looking at projects like this specifically if we're to evaluate them on their merit, certainly it's hard to object to them. I think the way I might think about projects like this is how it's kind of going back to the first criteria that I talked about earlier, which is uniqueness. How does this project stand to uniquely benefit from the structure of this fellowship? So what that means is this timeframe of six months, a hybrid approach, collaboration with other folks who are specifically focused on technology and policy but also broader academics who are also going to be present at Harvard who are the visiting scholars. So with all of this and also Harvard as a platform, would that benefit this project? And in what ways would this benefit that project? So I would orient it less on the specifics of the project itself, but more what about this structure could help accelerate the project that you're talking about. So hopefully that answers the question. Great, thanks so much, Joanne. All right, let's see. Tony, do you see any questions jumping out that you'd like to touch on? I'll grab one while you're looking, Tony. So there's a question about professional or academic references. Either of those is fine. The purpose of the references is folks who know you, know the quality of your work, know the type of person you are and can speak to those things. So it can be academic references, it can be professional references from industry. It's really dependent on the person and it's really whoever will best. It's less about having a big fancy name and much more about somebody who can speak to what you would bring as an individual to this fellowship. Okay, we have another. So there's understandably a lot of interest in this idea of potential collaboration and we don't want to discourage collaboration. So there is another question. Will participants be able to take part in each other's proposals at an early stage to find affinities? Yes, kickoff week in October, which will be one week in residence, COVID safety permitting in mid-October will be a chance to, it will be like a one week design sprint where folks will be creating roadmaps, challenged about their ideas, thinking about the ways in which this fellowship can be particularly valuable to what they're trying to do. And absolutely, should there be synergies across projects or across individuals, that would be the time to unpack that. However, we do want people to come in with ideas of what they would like to accomplish. And so we are, we don't want you to expect like to come in and say, well, I need to find two engineers and like a front-end designer and also I need a policy expert. We wouldn't want you to come in with those needs because folks are gonna have other things that they want to do, but we do want to attract folks that are collaborative in nature, generous and interdisciplinary. And as we said before, we will encourage that kind of magic to happen. I'm seeing a question. Do you already have an inbox full of referrals and projects that need staffing or help or that would be good for a fellowship applicant to work on? And I think the answer for this particular program is no, we really are looking for unique and new projects. But if anybody else wants to elaborate that, please feel free to jump in. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. The projects can be underway, they don't have to be brand new, but we aren't gonna be assigning you projects. There's a lot of projects in the world that folks are working on. We want you to bring those to this fellowship to continue working on them. And there are, as Joanne's and others have mentioned, a cohort of visiting scholars coming in that will be working on their research. There is other kinds of programming. There are students at HLS and broadly, there's a great cohort of Brooklyn Client Fellows coming in. I can see Becca doing the little fellows dance for those. So it's gonna be an amazing community, but the fellows coming into the RSM Assembly Fellowship will not be assigned projects or will not have a menu of projects to choose from. It is up to you to propose something in your application. Okay, we have a question. Do any social media companies provide funding to the Institute? And is there a potential conflict of interest if a proposed fellowship project is a threat to the existing business models of these social media companies? I think Professor Zitran, well, any of us could answer this, but I'll turn it to Professor Zitran. It would be seriously unfortunate if we were like, yes, we only want ideas that are completely aligned with the existing business models of the company. So no, that boy, is that setting up for a bad clip? That is exactly not what we are saying. It's a little trite to invoke the Harvard Veritas motto, but the whole point here is to have a demilitarized zone where ideas get tested on criteria and on merits and define what those merits are, argue about what would be good, figure out what the data would be that would help show what's good or what's bad under the criteria and the values we're talking about. All of that can be foregrounded. And in fact, for our participants, I think often from the commercial sector, it can in its way be just quite expanding to not have front and center, well, wait a minute, is this completely aligned with some other person at the company whose idea of corporate strategy? The purpose here is, again, to conceive oneself of what the public interest is and work on it. And I can speak more generally, I think in my thinking about the Institute for Rebooting Social Media, we're not just saying unplug it and plug it back in. It'll go back to the state it was in before it somehow messed up, but rather really thinking about what are practical, doable, plausible, short, medium-term, incremental interventions and by whom. And the other things are like, well, what would a clean slate look like? What if we had completely different incentives for different pieces of the ecosystem producing the social media we have right now? And those are also questions we're really eager to ask and try to answer. So, no, it is not, it might be worth describing those conflicts with business models as part of just the, this is why this might be hard to do, but there's not some central filter of us with that. And no, we're not taking funding from any of the social media companies. We do have funding because without it we wouldn't have funding. And we list our donors, which include the Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Reed Hoffman, Knight Foundation, Archwell Foundation. And am I missing anybody at the moment? That's who we have so far. Yep. Just to add on to that, one of the exciting things about this fellowship is specifically that because we have fundraised in advance for the fellowship. Critical work is welcome. It's not funded by social media companies and we ought to be critical and we are critical. And that's one of the reasons that this pop-up institute decided to take three years to address and tackle some of the challenges with social media rather than the predecessor program which was one year at a time. It was like, well, if we can do this much in one year, why don't we give it full three years and really see what we can do in that time? So we're going five minutes over. For those of you who would like to stay, thanks again for all the terrific questions. We're gonna try to get, sorry about the noise if you can hear that. We're gonna try to get to the last couple that we have. And as you know, there's a contact email on the website if we didn't get to your question or if you have another question that comes up. There's a question about, and Joanne, I would like to turn this one over to you. Can you speak to how fully conceptualized project proposals need to be? For example, is it worth applying if you have a general idea of what you want to accomplish but don't yet have much of a roadmap? I would say absolutely. So the way I might think about this is if you have a concrete sense of what the problem is, so if you have a clear problem definition but you might not know exactly how to build something or what might solve that problem, absolutely. So I think in the other way might be if you have something that you were building but you might be still fleshing on the problem, that's fine too. So it's not like you need to have a full-fledged plan for what you plan on doing, but more that if you have kind of a unique perspective on a problem that you wish to solve within this very huge space. So an example might be like the business model behind corporate VC fund of social media is broken. I'm gonna solve that, that's too big, right? But if you have something that's like a little more specific and I won't give any examples because I think that might bias you but you kind of get the idea. So even for policy you can't just say like, okay, rethink antitrust, that might be too big. So you don't need a specific plan but at least have a bite-size problem that's tackleable within six months period. Thanks, Joanne. We have a question about continuing affiliation with BKC. BKC for those of you who are just coming to this acronym is the Berkman Klein Center. Becca or Professor Mickens, would one of you like to speak to that? Yeah, Becca, go for it. Happy to. It's kind of like Hotel California. You can check out but you never leave, right? At the Berkman Klein Center. I speak of privileges and I think one of the great privileges we have as an institution is really being able to maintain relationships with people who come through our networks and continue to turn back to them. They can continue to turn to us in different ways. Sometimes that relationship is formal if it's fitting for that person to hold a different role or be collaborating with the center through one of our other programs or forms. Other times it's informal. The most important thing is that, affiliation isn't necessary in order to do good work together. So that's something we're really proud of and happy to foster amongst the community. So it depends as far as formality but as far as opportunities and ways to continue to remain part of the network, absolutely. No question there. And I think that's one of the things that I like the most about the community, that it is a community. And there are plenty of people who, for example, gone through prior assembly fellowships that I still stay in touch with. We still brainstorm about things. And like in a certain sense, like whether that's like an official BKC collaboration or not, almost as besides the point. It's really that you've met someone, you have a good connection with them, their community, you continue to talk. And that's really the important thing. Great, so we've answered the questions, all the questions in the Q&A. I know that some questions have come in through the chat that we haven't gotten to in as much detail as we would like. But for those of you who have a question that's particular to your individual case, feel free to send us an email about that particular circumstance. We tried to answer the questions that were most applicable to the broad group that's attending today. And with that, thank you to everybody here. And thanks to all of you for coming. And we will be posting this on our website soon. And so you feel free to revisit it and review any answers that you forgot that we already said. Thanks, everybody.