Selected contributors will be involved in Wikipedia editing, research, and uploading of climate-related information on a weekly basis. More specifically, the contributors will participate by:

• Helping to review and update/correct existing content on climate change issues or related topics already on Wikipedia.
• Helping to identify coordinated edits/uploads that distort Wikipedia content.
• Helping to research and upload debunks/clarifications/corrections on persistent misinformation.
• Helping to research and upload new relevant and topical information relating to climate change issues on Wikipedia.

Deadline of this Job: 20 November 2022

About the Role:

The successful candidates will join CfA’s CivicSignal Research team to conduct and publish research projects focussed on African media ecosystems. For examples of CfA’s previous research with partners, see the Global Disinformation Index Media Market Analyses for South Africa and Kenya, as well as Reuters Institute for Journalism’s Digital News Reports for South Africa and Nigeria.

Fundamentally, CivicSignal addresses issues and topics that impact democracies and civil society, seeking to provide the data and analysis necessary for government and citizens to make informed decisions. The projects range across a broad spectrum, including internal and external mis/disinformation, media sustainability, monitoring of hate speech and xenophobia, and general media ecosystem mapping.

As part of a multinational team within a growing organisation, you must be agile and able to thrive in a multicultural environment. You will need to work easily with people from different backgrounds who may speak different languages. 

You will join CivicSignal’s ML/AI-driven multinational research team, working on mapping media ecosystems within your respective country, writing monthly and quarterly reports on themes affecting media such as mis/disinformation, media sustainability, and media market analysis. The reports will be featured on civicsignal.africa and disinfo.africa as well as monthly newsletters. 

Responsibilities: 

• Designing and implementing pioneering digital research projects for both internal teams and external partners in academia, development agencies and policy think-tanks.
• Using surveys/polling to drive ongoing media monitoring and media data analytics, as part of CfA’s MediaData toolkit, to produce competitor landscape analysis and to determine share-of-voice and other metrics for regular insight reports.
• Digitising and integrating external qualitative research from strategic partners into CfA’s core collections, to enable contextual fresh insights.
• Drafting analytical data-driven reports and research papers designed to help shape public discourse within our ecosystems, or to help guide intervention/development strategies at donor/support agencies.

Required: 

• An understanding of media ecosystems and/or digital advocacy and/or digital civic engagement
• A minimum of three years’ experience in the field, and/or evidence of a substantive research project
• Proficiency in statistical analysis and market research, along with related qualitative and quantitative research methods.
• Competence in survey/polling methodology and questionnaire design, with specific reference to sample weighting, etc, for Africa-specific circumstances.
• Strong analytical and logical skills, with a demonstrable track record translating data into actionable insights.
• Knowledge of network analysis
• Excellent communication skills, including the ability to write for publication, present research insights and shape research proposals.
• Meticulous eye for detail to ensure data integrity and precision.
• The ability to collaborate with a diverse set of multidisciplinary project stakeholders.
• Experience in working with remote, distributed teams with agile methodologies.

Preferred: 

• Competence in computational linguistics, Natural Language Processing, and specifically the  methodologies and tools offered by the MediaCloud.org platform.
• Competence in other open source intelligence (OSINT) research techniques, including data scraping, data mining and other intelligence gathering techniques.
• Previous experience of contributing to reports and research publications
• Multiple languages, such as French, Arabic and other languages spoken in Africa.