Volunteer Researcher — Community Tech

Marra Community Hub is building a research function, and we're looking for volunteer researchers to help us study the technology we build and write it up properly.

What you'd do:

- Design and run small studies around our platform and the tools we deploy

- Review literature and keep our approach grounded in existing work

- Analyse the data we collect and write up findings

- Co-author reports, conference submissions, and where the work supports it, peer-reviewed papers

- Current students at any level — undergrad through PhD — who want real research experience while they study

- Honours, Masters, or PhD students, or early-career researchers wanting publishable output and authorship credit

- Anyone with a research methods background — quantitative, qualitative, or mixed. If you're still learning them, that's fine — we'll pair you with someone more senior

What we offer: named authorship on anything you contribute to, access to a real deployment with real users, Google Cloud and Microsoft compute through our nonprofit grants, work you can put on a CV or count toward a placement or capstone unit if your course allows it, and a reference from the committee.

Commitment: roughly 4–6 hours a week, remote, with occasional attendance at events in Glen Eira. Ongoing. If it suits you better, you can bundle it — around 15 hours a fortnight in whatever blocks work around your study or job.

• Note: any study involving participants goes through our committee for ethics review and consent before it runs.