About the Fellowship
Applications for the Practitioner Fellowship program are currently closed until further notice. Updates regarding future cohorts will be posted on this webpage.
The information below describes the Practitioner Fellowship program at the Digital Civil Society Lab (DCSL) for the cohorts from 2014-2024.
The Practitioner Fellowships at the Digital Civil Society Lab (DCSL) supported civil society practitioners working to address racial, gender, class/caste, sexuality, and economic inequality in relation to technology. The program aimed to catalyze and support a broad range of projects led by the selected fellows that could inform and improve the vitality of digital civil society.
Past projects included: designing tools to protect civil society actors and advance equity, developing policy frameworks to govern the use of data, prototyping tools to mitigate injustice in emerging technologies, or experimenting with new organizational structures focused on governance issues related to digital technologies.
The fellowship provided time, space, expertise, and financial support to help turn ideas into prototypes or action.Fellows became part of a cohort; and gained access to an intellectual community and an alumni network that continues to thrive.
Fellowships were supported by The Schmidt Family Foundation’s 11th Hour Project, The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, and other funders of the Lab. The digital age has expanded the potential for civil society while presenting new challenges and threats to its healthy operation. Our dependencies on digital software and infrastructure that are commercially built and government-surveilled require new insights into how these digital systems work and how we can safely and equitably engage them for civil society’s purposes. We invested in fellows from across the many domains in which civil society is active, including the arts, community engagement, education, the environment, healthcare, justice and so on, as long as projects are geared toward domain or sector level change.
Previous DCSL fellows have built online tools for understanding privacy regulations, prototyped new data governance mechanisms, informed digital rights legislation, expanded global interest in data trusts, and incubated a digital security exchange. Learn more about the DCSL Practitioner Fellows.
Questions
Inquiries may be directed to the Digital Civil Society Lab: digcivsoc@stanford.edu. We also encourage following along for updates on the Digital Civil Society Lab community by subscribing to the Stanford PACS newsletter here.