Launching: Founding Fellows. Plus: peek inside our day-to-day and DC visit
Jeff and I spoke at SXSW; Katie filmed us sharing why we founded the Integrity Institute. Thanks to all the Institute members for making our dream come true!
Hello,
These are productive times at the Integrity Institute. You might have noticed our more public external activities – SXSW! MozFest! Conferences and panels galore! But what you might not have seen is that we’ve welcomed our new community organizer: Maddie Aleman! And here’s some more news: we have a few new programs we’re going to announce quite soon.
As we enter into a period of intensive organizational leveling-up, there is a group of people who have been with us from the very beginning that we’d like to honor publicly.
As you might remember, back in February 2021 we were a group of just nine meeting on Jitsi. We didn’t know if this idea for a public organization of integrity workers would work, let alone what our exact model would be. But a group of dedicated folks stuck with us and helped us get off the ground, and we decided to call them “fellows” because that seemed like an appropriate honorific at the time.
Now that we’re 1.5 years since our official launch, these folks are still around and helping us out! Plus we picked up more stellar people – honestly, co-founders – along the way. These fellows helped us grow so much, and with the new programs we would be announcing soon, we’re at a place where the staff can take the load off of their shoulders and allow them to focus more on participating intellectually as members rather than on organizational development.
We think this is great news! And we also get to honor these folks publicly – they’re now “founding fellows” of the Integrity Institute. Here’s an excerpt of what we sent them:
Hey, Fellows!
We are going to make an announcement soon about our fellows program and wanted to give you a heads up. Overall, this is a sign that things are going well! When we first created the Fellow designation, we honestly didn't even know if the Integrity Institute would survive a year or two, haha, so we kinda treated how long a fellowship should last as "a problem we would be lucky to have."
But, thanks in a huge part to you all who genuinely believed in the Institute and put in the effort to support it in its infancy, the Institute is definitely going to be around for years! And it is now time for us to think about how long fellowships should be "active."
We are going to be winding down the existing Fellowship program and [REDACTED]. We would like to designate all of you as "Founding Fellows" going forward, to make clear that you played an instrumental role in helping the Integrity Institute come into being, but also make clear that there are no longer any expectations around your activity within the Institute. Thank you all so much for your help! We will always be grateful for everything you've done, and the Institute will always be a home for you.
Our Founding Fellows are amazing people, and you get to meet (most of) them in the “Staff & Fellows” section on the About Us page of our website. We hope you’ll join us in saluting them, and we cannot wait to share the exciting new programs soon!
Community and Think-Tank Newsletters
The Integrity Institute is a “member-powered think tank” – even though the think tank side is more visible externally, our community wing is the foundation of all we do. Community organizer Maddie Aleman and research project manager Abby Lawson have each developed their internal newsletters, which show how member-only events and interactions among our community leads to think-tank activities and working groups for our research work. Here’s a peek into these two internal newsletters:
Community newsletter, 4/3/2023
Think-Tank newsletter, 3/29/2023
Moderating the Fediverse! Also, DC next week
You might’ve seen from the screenshot above already, but just in case – we’re hosting our very first public event of 2023 next week! Darius Kazemi and Kat Lo from Meedan will be joining member Laure X Cast to talk about how to moderate the fediverse on April 13. Register here!
Katie, Jeff, Rachel, and I will be in DC next week – we’ll meet with partners and host a member happy hour with our academic friends at the George Washington University’s Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics. If you’re around, let us know!
Thanks for all that you do.
On behalf of the whole team, Sahar