Resonance Technical Fellow

Resonance Technical Fellow
6 months · ~5 hours/week · Remote
Resonance is looking for a Technical Fellow to help us build technology in service of a different vision for AI, one where communities have a meaningful say in how it is built, governed, and used.
Over six months, you’ll work across two areas: building lightweight tools that support Resonance’s work with communities and helping us design our first community-owned AI experiments using open-weight models and locally governed data or knowledge.
This is a part-time fellowship with significant ownership, technical mentorship, and the chance to build alongside real communities from the beginning.
What you’ll do
Build tools for community participation. Your first project will be a simple web application that helps local hosts organize Resonance gatherings, share agendas and resources, and give participants an easy way to engage.
Build with real users. Work directly with Resonance hosts and communities, see how they actually use what you build, and iterate based on what you learn.
Build in the open. Release what you create as open source and document it so that other communities can understand, adapt, and build on it.
Explore community-owned AI. Help us investigate what greater community ownership of AI could look like in practice. Which open models make sense for a rural library, nonprofit, or local government? What could realistically run locally? When does self-hosting matter? How can communities maintain meaningful control over their own data and knowledge?
Help design our first pilot. Work with the Resonance team and a partner community to translate locally defined priorities into a technically credible experiment, prototype, or implementation plan.
By the end of one month
You’ll have shipped technology being used by real Resonance communities, contributed an open-source project others can build on, and helped develop the technical direction for our first community-owned AI pilot.
You might be a fit if:
You’ve built and shipped a web application yourself and are comfortable using AI coding tools like Claude Code or Cursor.
You’ve experimented with open-weight models and understand some of the practical tradeoffs between APIs, cloud deployment, local inference, and self-hosting.
You can explain a technical tradeoff to a librarian, community organizer, or local official without hiding behind jargon.
You work well independently, make good use of a few focused hours each week, and speak up when you’re stuck.
Experience with civic tech, public-interest technology, data governance, open-source AI, or rural communities is a plus.
About Resonance
Resonance helps local communities imagine, choose, and build their own futures with AI. We work with trusted local leaders to bring people together to make sense of how AI is changing their communities, define what they want their future to look like, and turn those priorities into local action. Now we’re building the next layer of that work: helping communities translate their values into practical AI standards, policies, and experiments, and exploring what it looks like for communities themselves to have greater ownership over the technology and data shaping their lives. resonancesalon.com
To Apply
Send a resume and cover letter about why this fellowship interests you, along with a link to something you’ve built to Operations@resonancesalon.com by October 31, 2026.

Work arrangement
Yes