Academic and Associate collaboration

Welcome to the LF Decentralized Trust - (wiki will be updated to new domain after launch)

**please review the below and if you believe your organization qualifies, please fill out this form on behalf of your organization. **

NOTE: All Associate members need to be pre-qualified before applying to be a member on our join portal. Please read below for information on how to qualify for Associate membership. If you are an Individual and not leading an organization who wants to contribute as a formal entity, you can contribute as an individual only.

As an open collaboration we welcome Non-Profit Organizations, Government, Educational and Research Institutions and Public Sector/Governments. To formalize such collaboration we have created an Associate Membership Tier. Unlike for private corporate sector General and Premier Members, for Associate members, no membership fee structure is imposed on pre-qualified public sector members; however, all members will be expected and required to participate in applicable ways as contributors to LF Decentralized Trust.

LF Decentralized Trust expects Associate Members to contribute in form of research, code development, documentation, collaboration with Special Interest Groups, Taskforces, etc. We believe that the variety of cultures, experiences and backgrounds can help grow the Hyperledger ecosystem.

Some of the opportunities to work with LF Decentralized Trust Include:

For Universities
Active participation in Special Interest Groups (SIG) and other taskforces. Active means that you/members of your organization actually contribute to the development of the work products of a given group (code, white papers etc) and are recognized by that community as a participant. All groups are open to public and meetings happen over Zoom. If they are not friendly towards your time zone, please use the mailing list/discord or work with the existing participants to create local meetings. Don't be shy!

Create Content
- Write and Publish White papers, ebooks, blogs and more
- Help translating the documents and videos
- Create videos, demos, etc.
Contributing code (to Labs, to projects, builds apps, etc)

Take part in our Mentorship Program - as a mentor or mentee.

Run Events

There are a range of different types of events you may be interested in running. These range from introductory meetups that are good for introducing people to Hyperledger and helping them get familiar with the community and technology. And then there are events such as, hackathons, that are good ways to engage people after they’ve gained a solid understanding of Hyperledger. Here are guides to help you run events:

Conduct and Publish Research

In Hyperledger Foundation we want to bridge the gap between theoretical research and enterprises that want to implement your solutions and ideas. We believe our projects are a great opportunity for you to do research and contribute to enterprise blockchain solutions in open source.

- If you would like to submit your paper or thesis to our research library, you can do it! We are happy to republish or link to your papers from our website.
  - Please email membership@fdecentralizedtrust.org
  - Please make sure you have the right to publish the work (some universities and conferences only allow the arXiv publications to be shared)
- Share your research ideas with others using universities@lists.hyperledger.org : there are many researchers that will want to work with you!

Expand the Ecosystem

We know that many of our members have already academic outreach programs. That’s great! Let’s make sure we connect and learn from each other. If you are actively working with some industry partners, please share with us how is the program going and how can we contribute to it. By making sure our members are all connected, the community grows. If you have any feedback email membership@fdecentralizedtrust.org

Anyone can contribute to Hyperledger Foundation. Here are some contributions your organization can do that will be reviewed upon application for becoming an associate member:

Contribute code and development time (to Labs, projects, builds apps, etc)
Provide resources for testing or documentation
Participate actively in LF Decentralized projects
Marketing, promoting and driving interest in the project. For example, help develop demos, explanation videos etc.
Organize and/or provide space for meetings, hackathons , bootcamps, workshops, etc.
Research on Hyperledger frameworks and tools and contribution of this research back to our community
Contributing research papers / academic publications. For example, writing papers/articles on any of the aspects of LF Decentralized Trust either technical or architecture or business/market research.
Add LF Decentralized projects to course curriculum which can also include having students do assignments around LF Decentralized Trust (coding, bug fixes or evaluation of architecture, papers on market analysis…anything that would help the community move forward and find next things to work on). More relevant for the universities and training associations.
Research on LF Decentralized frameworks and tools and contribution of this research back to our community - if you have any reports or other documents we could publish, that is splendid.
Developing course that contains teaching about LF Decentralized Trust in it, and either having students do assignments around Hyperledger (coding, bug fixes or evaluation of architecture, papers on market analysis…anything that would help the community move forward and find next things to work on). More relevant for the universities and training associations.
Translate LF Decentralized Trust documentation into non-English languages
Active participation in Working Groups, such as the learning materials WG or Special Interest Groups (SIGs). What we mean by active is that you/members of your organization actually contribute to the development of the Work products of a given group (code, white papers etc) and are recognized by that community as a participant. All WGs/SIGs are open to public and meetings happen over the phone.
Provide internships and intern mentors for the LF Decentralized Trust community
Introduction to companies that are members of their consortia and could join LF Decentralized Trust