Location: Remote
Commitment: Part-time, volunteer
Compensation: Unpaid

We are looking for someone—or a small team with a clear lead—to take on co-organizing for Season 4 and beyond.

The seminar is an invite-only Tuesday series (typically 11am–1pm ET) that runs in ~8-week seasons. Over three seasons, speakers have included Yoshua Bengio, Lawrence Lessig, Diane Coyle, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ted Chiang, Bruce Schneier, and many others. Recordings and notes from past seasons are on publicai.network/seminar.

Season 4 is already taking shape: the business of AI, co-organized with Gideon Lichfield (Harvard), starting mid-summer 2026.

This is one of the best vantage points we know for shaping the conversation around public AI. The role is especially well suited to a PhD student, postdoc, or researcher working on public AI or closely related topics (policy, economics, HCI, law, media, etc.).

What you would do

  • Own the season as lead organizer (emails, schedule, follow-through), with optional supporting teammates for invites and session support.
  • Shape the theme and update the seminar page on GitHub.
  • Recruit speakers—balancing topical fit with bringing high-level people into the public AI movement. Sessions are two hours; you can pair two speakers per week when it fits.
  • Recruit members via the application form, Substack, and speaker networks; manage responses and oversubscription thoughtfully.
  • Run logistics: application deadlines, researchseminars.org, repeating calendar events with a consistent Zoom link, member announcements, Slack, and suggested readings.
  • Host sessions: welcome and format (short recorded segment, then Chatham House discussion), speaker reminders, AI summaries, and post-session publishing (sanitized notes, recordings on YouTube/Archive.org, updates to the seminar page).

A detailed runbook (email templates, intro script, recurring checklists) is available for incoming organizers.

Qualifications

  • Graduate student (PhD) or postdoc status, or equivalent depth in a relevant field.
  • Strong written communication and follow-through on multi-week programs.
  • Comfort coordinating academics, policymakers, and industry guests remotely.
  • Interest in public AI as a movement, not only as a research niche.

Experience running reading groups, workshops, or seminar series is a plus.

To apply, send a brief note on your background and interest to hello@publicai.network.

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