Internet Archive Canada and BC + AI are opening the AI Builders Fellowship to one builder anywhere in the world: six focused weeks and a $5,000 award to turn a massive Canadian public archive into an open-source experiment.
The material is the Government Publications collection, a large and uneven record of what Canadian governments chose to publish. The brief is deliberately broad. Build a research tool, trace a civic pattern, make a strange interface, turn records into culture, or find another way to help people use, question, and get lost in the public record.
This is not a pitch for another generic AI wrapper. The work should be useful to a specific person or community, imaginative enough to offer a new way into the archive, open enough for others to examine and build on, and scoped tightly enough to become a credible working artifact in six weeks.
Applications are open and close August 21 at 11:59 PM Pacific. The selected fellow begins September 1 and builds through mid-October with archive context from Internet Archive Canada and regular check-ins from BC + AI.
The fellowship is designed to culminate with the fellow presenting the work alongside Internet Archive founder and digital librarian Brewster Kahle at Futureproof Festival on October 28, if the project is ready.
Read the fellowship brief and application details, then get your Futureproof Festival pass if you want to be in the room when the work arrives.