Application overview and process
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.
In 2018 the Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science (SICSS) began including partner locations to broaden access to the field. Most partner locations conduct one week of intensive lectures and group exercises and one week creating new research projects in interdisciplinary teams. Organizers of partner locations either use our open-source teaching materials or create their own curriculum to serve the needs of the populations they aim to serve. May organizers also invite local speakers to further enrich their curriculum. This model has been used successfully at universities, non-profit companies, and corportations around the world. For a list of previous organizations that have hosted partner locations, see this link
In our experience, the minimum budget to support an in-person partner location is about $13,000, but the exact amount depends on local conditions. Virtual events can be done more cheaply. Here are some sample budgets for in-person events. If you have more questions about budgeting—or grants that may be available to support partner locations—please contact us at rsfcompsocsci@gmail.com. Note: If you are a visa holder outside of your country of citizenship, please work with your institution to determine whether you will be able to accept an honorarium payment for your role organizing a SICSS event.
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. Also, we ask that at least one of the organizers of a SICSS location be a faculty member or senior employee at a sponsoring institution in order to ensure access to necessary resources and create more robust connections to sponsoring organizations.
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 are guided by the following principles:
The training provided by SICSS will be free to participants.
Any materials that organizers develop will be released open source.
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.
For a much more detailed description of the process of hosting a partner location, please consult our Handbook for Organizers
Dear friend of SICSS,
We are very pleased to announce this call for applications to host SICSS partner locations in 2024.
As in past years, fundraising to support the continued growth of the program remains a challenge. SICSS leadership is committed to the search, and hopes to be able to announce possible funding for a small number of sites again in 2024, though this has not yet been confirmed.
As in past years, our resources are limited — as much as we would love to fully fund every organizing team who submits an application to run a SICSS partner location, we will likely be unable to do so. Therefore, we encourage organizers who have capacity and means to do so to look into self-sponsoring their location via their own universities or organizations, or through developing partnerships with non-profit organizations or corporations.
Though we are undergoing a review of our grant-making process, we expect that applications selected for financial support will receive $15,000 to support the cost of the institute — $8,200 for honoraria (to be split between organizers and TAs); $1,800 to support the cost of food and room rental fees; and $5,000 to fund participant research projects. If you require less funding than this amount (perhaps you are running a location that is only a week long, or are receiving funding from alternate sources), please indicate so on the application.
Applications will be reviewed by SICSS leadership. Regardless of whether you apply for funding or self-sponsor a SICSS location, please complete the short application form below. If you have any questions, please consult the F.A.Q. below or email us at rsfcompsocsci@gmail.com.
With very best wishes, Chris Bail, SICSS Director
Applications to host a partner site in 2024 are due on Friday, November 17 (2023) by 5pm U.S. E.S.T. Please send completed applications to rsfcompsocsci@gmail.com
That’s fine. Each year we have locations spread around the world.
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 are our post-mortems from 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021. Also, here are some articles and blog posts about the Summer Institutes:
Yes. Here are some sample budgets for an in-person partner location with 20 participants. However, you will need to adjust the numbers to align with the costs at your location. Note: If you are a visa holder outside of your country of citizenship, please work with your institution to determine whether you will be able to accept an honorarium payment for your role organizing a SICSS event.
Yes. Please consult the Handbook for Organizers linked above. Also Here’s some advice about running a partner location.
That’s up to you based on what you think makes sense in your context. The standard SICSS is two weeks: one week for instructor-led training and one week for participant-led group research projects. However, in the past, we have had one week partner locations that just focus on the instructor-led training. We’ve also had three week partner locations. Some added an extra week to allow more time for the participant-led group research projects and some added a one week “bootcamp” before the first week of SICSS.