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SICSS partner locations |
You can host a partner location of the Summer Institutes of Computational Social Science (SICSS) at your university, company, NGO, or government agency. For universities, SICSS provides an exciting approach to training and building interdisciplinary community. For companies, NGOs, and government agencies, hosting a parter location enables building connections with the academic community, providing training for current employees, and recruiting future employees.
Starting in 2018, the Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science (SICSS) began including partner locations in order to increase the number of participants. The Summer Institute is two weeks long and parter locations typically involve: 1) live-streamed lectures on topics ranging from automated text analysis to ethics; 2) training exercises to reinforce key ideas from lectures; 3) live-streamed research talks from leaders in the field; and 4) participant-led group research projects. This model has been used successfully at universities and companies around the world.
The Summer Institutes are highly modular and the open source curriculum can be adapted to the skills and interests at each location. The minimum budget to support a partner location is about $15,000 but depends on local conditions. Here are some sample budgets. If you have more questions about budgeting---or grants that may be available to support partner locations---please contact us at rsfcompsocsci[at]gmail[dot]com.
In order to ensure quality and consistency, all partner locations must have a former participant of SICSS as one of the local organizers. If you don't have any SICSS alumni at your organization, you can contact us about finding a former participant that could collaborate with you. For example, in 2019 Matti Nelimarkka (SICSS '17) collaborated with Akın Ünver to run a partner location in Istanbul, Turkey (Kadir Has University).
There were 7 partner locations in 2018: Hunter College, New York University, Northwestern University, University of Cape Town, University of Colorado, University of Helsinki, and University of Washington.
There were 11 partner location in 2019: Bamberg, Germany (University of Bamberg), Boston, MA (MIT), Cape Town, South Africa (University of Cape Town), Chicago, IL (Northwestern University), Istanbul, Turkey (Kadir Has University), Los Angeles, CA (UCLA), Monterrey, Mexico (Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León), Oxford, United Kingdom (Oxford University), New York, NY (Hunter College-CUNY), Research Triangle Park, NC (RTI International), and Zürich, Switzerland (ETH Zürich).
The mission of the Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science is to provide open, high-quality training in computational social science to researchers around the world in order to accelerate the growth of the field and ensure that it develops practices that are in the long-term interests of science and society.
As we work toward this mission, we will be guided by the following principles:
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The training provided by SICSS will be free to participants.
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All materials that organizers develop will be released open source.
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Funders and partners will have no impact on content. Our firewall between funding and content will be modeled on high-quality news organizations, such as the New York Times and National Public Radio.
In order to apply to host a partner site, please submit this form to rsfcompsocsci[at]gmail[dot]com by November 1st, 2019. We will make our best effort to get back to you by November 15th, 2019.
- What if I can't run the partner location during the scheduled dates?
That's fine. SICSS 2018 in Boulder, Colorado and SICSS 2019 in Bamberg, Germany both happened at different times from the other partner locations.
- What if I want to host a partner location in a different time zone from other locations?
That's fine. Each year we have locations spread around the world. A common strategy is to watch the recordings of the lectures rather than the livestreamed version.
- How can I learn more about what it is like at a partner location?
At the end of each year, we write a post-mortem that describes what went well and what could be better at each of the partner locations. Here's our 2018 post-mortem. Also, here are some articles and blog posts about the Summer Institutes:
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Two weeks at the Summer Institute for Computational Social Science
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Do you have any sample budgets?
Yes. Here are some sample budgets for a partner location with 20 participants. However, you will need to adjust the numbers to align with the costs at your location.