Field Notes
Transparency Fellows complete peer review of first studies
Every fellow's mini-study went through cohort review before publication. Two did not survive it, which is how the process is supposed to work.
The Transparency Fellows cohort has completed the supervised mini-study component of the fellowship. Each fellow selected a narrow question, gathered material through information requests and public records, and presented findings to the cohort for review before anything left the room.
The review standard
Fellows were asked three questions about every claim in a draft: what is the source, how large is the sample, and would this survive a hostile reading. Claims that could not answer all three were required to be either narrowed or dropped.
Two studies did not clear review in their original form. One had generalised from a single district to the state; the other rested on a document whose provenance the fellow could not establish. Both were revised, one substantially. Neither outcome is a failure of the fellowship — it is the fellowship functioning.
What the studies covered
The questions fellows chose clustered around a common theme: not whether records exist, but how hard they are to obtain. Response times to information requests, the frequency of vagueness objections, and the proportion of replies that answered only part of what was asked.
We are not publishing aggregate conclusions from a single cohort's work. The sample is too small, and saying so is the point of teaching research ethics before research method.
What fellows do next
Fellows who complete the curriculum can be trained to facilitate community rights circles independently. Several from this cohort have already run village circles without a staff facilitator present, and feedback from those sessions drove two revisions to the standard primer.
Next cohort
Applications open through the volunteer form. Fluency in Telugu, Hindi, or Urdu is genuinely useful; a legal background is not required.