The Open Technology Fund (OTF) is now accepting entries for its Digital Integrity Fellowship Programme (DIFP) from Individuals of all ages from around the world who demonstrate skill and ability to perform the relevant digital security tasks and show desire to grow their knowledge through mentorship and cross-discipline collaboration.
The fellowship aims to fill missing digital security capacity needs for on-the-ground organizations promoting human rights, focusing on those fighting to increase free expression and internet freedom. The internet freedom community needs a deeper and richer base of expertise to gather in-field real-time data about the twin challenges for small and medium sized organizations to maintain up-to-date digital security strategies and policies and for the internet freedom technology developer community to fully grasp the challenges individuals in the field face on a daily basis. DIFP aims to fill these gaps and others, often unaddressed by common digital security training and capacity building initiatives, which can fail to increase long-term expertise within organizations and locally or fail to influence research and technical development.
Interested fellows must have experience working within digital security teams with a holistic security mindset and be willing to work with diverse sets of at-risk individuals. They must have contributed to digital security technology projects to make them more suitable for users or raised awareness about digital security needs for at-risk communities. Generally, a fellow’s work may be to conduct the initial digital security assessments, understand and document the organization’s adversary as well as the organization’s culture, vision, and what they need to succeed in the face of their digital threats.
DIFP fellows embed with a host organization or organizations for the duration of their fellowship. When applying, applicants can specify any organization of their choice, as long as sufficient demonstration of the relevance of the organization(s) needs for digital security assistance and support from relevant staff at the organizations has been met in the application.
Before applying, interested candidates should initiate a strategic conversation with the organization(s) and network(s) that they intend to assist and work with for their fellowship duration. Further, fellowship candidates should ensure they and the organization(s) agree they are a good match; have capabilities aligned with the organization’s overall digital security needs and interest and have the means of achieving them and that organization’s leadership believes in the organizational change expected to occur.
These conversations should also identify areas of particular concern for the organizations, including but not limited to: the types of threats they face to their work by adversaries, previous digital security issues experienced, anticipated escalations in threats to their work, etc.
The fellowship candidate will work with the organizations’ leadership and OTF to share concrete feedback to the internet freedom community about specific usage of digital security / internet freedom technologies.
The fellowship will provide fixed monthly stipends to individuals capable of addressing short-term and long-term threats to freedom of expression online. Fellows provide organizations and communities most affected by internet freedom violations (like journalists, human rights defenders, NGOs, activists, bloggers, and others) support for their digital security needs. Simultaneously, Fellows will educate the broader internet freedom field about the threats and vulnerabilities experienced, to ensure that emerging and existing technologies best meet the needs of at-risk communities.
Successful fellows are given a stipend of 5,000 USD per month for a maximum of 12 months and will also be allotted an “organizational support stipend” of 5,000 USD total to cover equipment and subscription costs that will maintain security protections for organizations receiving digital security assistance from the fellow.
Applications close on July 15, 2019.
For more information and to apply, please visit: https://www.opentech.fund/funds/digital-integrity-fellowship/
