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Spring 2023 Community Services Intern

Creatively translate research into clean, compelling Community and publication design with a thoughtfully remote and mission-driven team | Remote, part-time for 4 months, $20.00/hour
Published onAug 04, 2022
Spring 2023 Community Services Intern
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Community Services Intern, PubPub Content Team

Location

Remote

Hours

~15 hours/week

Duration

August/September 2022 – December 2022, with potential to extend

Remuneration

$20.00/hour

The Knowledge Futures Group is hiring a Community Services Intern to support Community Services on its open source publishing platform, PubPub. The role involves direct communication with partners and authors to better understand their work and publishing goals, along with the ability to creatively translate information into clean, compelling Community design. Experience producing multimodal publications, or in multimedia development, is a plus.

About the Job

  • Support Community Services outreach and production assignments while reporting to KFG’s Director of Community Publishing Services.

  • Create media—including video abstracts, visualizations, and other interactive elements—to enhance publications.

  • Interact and manage communications with publishers, authors, and/or editors to learn about their work and grasp the goals of their publications.

  • Help write user and best-practices guides to improve onboarding and new user experiences.

  • Provide thoughtful feedback to the PubPub Content and Product teams with the goal of improving our publications, products, and operations.

  • Maintain your production calendar toward ensuring the timely completion of assignments.

  • Participate in demos for potential new partners.

About You

  • You have some knowledge about scholarly communications, have a sense of the challenges in the field, and have thoughts on how to bring about positive change.

  • You’re always learning and enjoy making things as part of the learning process.

  • You enjoy translating ideas into practice.

  • You don’t want to just maintain or improve upon existing publishing models, but instead want to think of and implement new pathways for effective knowledge exchange. You view the open sharing of perspectives and ideas as part of this work.

  • You know the difference between an em and en dash, and have an opinion on the Oxford comma.

  • You’re eager to express KFG’s (and your own) editorial values through the work you do.

  • You want to work on a team that respects your ideas about the publication process and models that improve scholarship, not just capitalize on it.

  • You want breathing room to experiment, be thoughtful, and get things right, but without losing sight of longer-term goals.

About PubPub and the Content Team

PubPub is an open-source publishing tool used by over 3,000 journals, conferences, books, and other diverse types of communities. At its heart, it features a collaborative document editor with strong support for academic standards. Layered on top are features for discussion and dynamic content. In the works are powerful tools for editorial review and enabling small and large communities to thrive on PubPub. Underlying all of this is a belief that better publishing tools can help researchers focus on doing their best work and communicating about this work effectively, rather than adapting their work to the whims of gatekeepers and outdated, legacy systems.

The Content Team works directly with users and potential users of PubPub to better understand their goals and translate that into effective implementations of PubPub’s features. In 2022, we launched a Community Services Menu, which outlines ways we contract with partners to service their publishing communities on a more formal basis. This Menu is a reflection of the needs of PubPub users and, as such, will evolve over time. Also within our scope are communications about KFG; producing platform documentation and help resources; and the editorial management of the Commonplace, a KFG publication.

About KFG

The Knowledge Futures Group, originally founded as a partnership between the MIT Press and the MIT Media Lab, is now a non-profit institution that builds technology for the production, curation, and preservation of knowledge in service of the public good. It currently oversees the development of four products: PubPub, the Underlay, the Commonplace, and DocMaps.1

How to Apply

If you’re interested, please send us an email with a resume or CV and a paragraph or two about why this roles appeals to you, what skills/experience you aim to build on, and what skills/experience you aim to gain. We’d also love to know what you’re interested in and what motivates you.

We welcome interns from diverse backgrounds with diverse skillsets. If you have significant personal experience or engagement with low-income communities, international communities, or fields and languages that are underrepresented in academia, scholarly publishing, or open data, we strongly encourage you to apply.

If you feel like you could do a great job as an intern, please consider applying. And if you’re still hesitant after reading this bold text, send us a short note anyway with any questions you have!

Working With Us

Work with a thoughtfully distributed team: we were a remote team before it was a global necessity, and put a lot of effort into making the remote experience a great one. Learn more about how we work in our Handbook. Once it’s safe to travel and gather again, we’ll resume our roughly quarterly in-person team retreats at fun locations throughout the U.S.

Enjoy industry-standard perks with a team that prioritizes remote participation.

Contribute to our larger mission at the Knowledge Futures Group: we’re building a future where the infrastructure to create and access knowledge is controlled by people who serve the public interest, starting with core projects like PubPub and The Underlay. As a KFG team member, you’ll be able to contribute to those efforts as well, and we’ll support any ambitions you might have to contribute to our publication, the Commonplace, and beyond.

Our values

In some contexts, the balance between providing valuable experience, and the provision of pay and fair treatment, has proven difficult to strike. In the interest of developing our internship policy within a framework of basic fairness, we offer five simple principles that define KF Internships.

1. Pay

KF Internships will always be paid internships.

2. Non-competition

Performance isn’t measured against other interns, especially in terms of “payoff.” An intern’s colleagues are their collaborators in pursuit of common objectives.

3. Dignity

There’s no shame in project-based work. Long live the freelance! Interns should take pride in what they contribute, and participate with the dignity they deserve.

4. Value and growth

We commit to the provision of educative experiences that interns can value, and expect in turn that interns will be committed to projects that contribute to the growth of the KFG in substantial, measurable ways. This means we prioritize:

  • Project-based outputs

  • Mentorship over delegation

  • Tangible skill development

5. People over prestige

We seek interns from diverse backgrounds and do not consider the credentials or prestigiousness of the intern’s institution in our selection process. We want our interns to reflect the diversity of the public producing knowledge.

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A Supplement to this Pub
Internships Policy
Description

How we think about the role(s) of interns, source them in just and equitable ways, and conceptualize both their place within the KFG and the tasks they undertake.

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