It’s a weird thing to write: when you’ve left your first dream job (IBM Watson) for a dream opportunity (a residency with BuzzFeed and Eyebeam) and now….you’re tacking on another dream job, how dreams can you dream? Apparently, quite a few. I’m incredibly excited to announce starting in April I will be a researcher and designer specifically for online harassment at Wikimedia. And, I’ll be working specifically with a team using machine learning. Does this...sound familiar? It sounds eerily like my fellowship proposal, doesn’t it? ;)
Okay, it’s not a weird thing to write, it’s an extremely amazing, fantastic, and humbling opportunity. What I had proposed to research at BuzzFeed and Eyebeam, using machine learning to study, analyze and potentially mitigate online harassment is being put into actuality, and into practicality. It’s going to be realized and manifested on a large scale, at Wikimedia, for Wikipedia. It’s everything a research could hope for.
What’s even more exciting is that I can continue my fellowship. The opportunity to continue my work at BuzzFeed and explore r&d within design, creative technology, and journalism while exploring open source knowledge sharing will push my own art and research practice further. All of the research I will be generating at Wikimedia will be open source and radically transparent, per Wikimedia’s commitment to updating their community and involving their community into their internal processes and decisions. One of the reasons I’ve decided to go to Wikimedia now was and is this commitment to radical transparency and their community. Additionally, Wikimedia’s grant required an immediate hire and this….was a dream opportunity too exciting to pass up. I’m excited to see what happens when I join Wikimedia in April.
Open Lab for Journalism, Technology, and the Arts is a workshop in BuzzFeed’s San Francisco bureau. We offer fellowships to artists and programmers and storytellers to spend a year making new work in a collaborative environment. Read more about the lab or sign up for our newsletter.