Take part
Most of the seats are open.
The Elendil Initiative is young on purpose: the agenda was written before the roster, so that people join a question rather than an institution. There are five ways in, and none of them require you to leave what you already do.
Ways in
Five roles, one requirement.
The requirement is that you can be moved by evidence. Everything else — discipline, seniority, sector, country — is deliberately open.
Affiliated researcher
Ongoing · unpaid, named
You keep your own post and your own affiliation, and you carry one question on the agenda. You publish under your own name, and you are free to reach a conclusion the initiative dislikes.
Who this fits · Doctoral students, postdocs, faculty, and industry researchers with a publication record in ML, security, law, or public policy.
Working-group member
One track · a few hours a month
Groups form around a question rather than a title. They meet online, argue, split the work, and produce a note — or a documented reason the question cannot be answered yet.
Who this fits · Anyone competent on the question, including practitioners who have never written a paper.
Reviewer
Per note · a few hours
Nothing leaves the initiative without an adversarial read. Reviewers are named in the note unless they ask not to be, and a review that kills a draft is the most valuable kind.
Who this fits · Domain specialists willing to say plainly that something does not hold.
Student & early career
Internship, thesis, or a first note
Several agenda questions are the right size for a Master's thesis or a first paper. We will co-supervise with your institution, and the resulting work is yours.
Who this fits · Master's and doctoral students in Europe and beyond.
Institutional interlocutor
By arrangement
Regulators, ministries, standards bodies, labs, and operators can put a hard question to the initiative, or open a dataset to it. You get the answer at the same time as everyone else.
Who this fits · Institutions that want the question studied rather than the conclusion delivered.
The bargain
What we ask, and what you get.
Stated up front, because an initiative that runs on volunteered expertise owes its members an explicit deal.
What we ask
- Argue from evidence, and say when you do not have any.
- Publish the negative result with the same care as the positive one.
- Declare what you are paid for and by whom, before you start.
- Disagree in writing, in public, and without personalising it.
- Accept that a note you worked on may conclude against your prior.
What we offer
- A question that matters, defined precisely enough to work on.
- Named authorship — the initiative does not absorb your credit.
- Adversarial review before anything is published.
- Compute, data access, and reproduction support where we have them.
- No exclusivity: you keep your post, your affiliation, and your freedom.
Most roles are unpaid, and we say so plainly rather than implying otherwise. Where a question is funded, the funder is named in the note and the members working on it are told before they commit — see our independence commitment.
How it goes
From a paragraph to a published note.
Write to us
A paragraph is enough: what you work on, and which question on the agenda you would take. A link to something you have written helps more than a CV.
A conversation
A call to find out whether the question you want is the question we have, and whether the initiative is actually useful to you.
A question, in writing
You leave with a scoped question, a working group, and an agreed idea of what would count as an answer — including what would count as a failure.
Publish under your name
Reviewed, dated, numbered, and open. If it disproves something we said earlier, that goes in the note too.