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Common Ground, Digital Public Goods Fellow

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About the portfolio organization

Living Landscapes (anchoring the Common Ground initiative):  

Living Landscapes is a lean backbone organisation, being set up to anchor Common Ground, a collaborative systems entrepreneurship initiative in the domain of environmental governance and rural livelihoods, in India. It will focus on ‘field setting’, so that entrepreneurial action by multiple actors is accelerated and multiplied, seeding the ecosystem with institutional apparatus and change leaders to leave a legacy that is beyond any single initiative.  By connecting and convening actors, Living Landscapes will nurture relationships with and between networks of partners (governments, philanthropy, and other market and civil society actors) to provide the catalytic impetus necessary to spur action and amplify impact. The organisation will endeavour to help establish trust, agility and diversity within the initiative, by promoting a collegial way of working, while also ensuring regulatory compliance and accountability to outcomes. Living Landscapes has been incorporated as a non-profit organisation in India under Section 8 of the Companies Act, 2013.  
 
The Common Ground Initiative:   

Common Ground seeks to leverage the unique opportunity presented by the Commons to address three linked crises of our times – livelihoods, climate, and social equity – by bringing in a socio-ecological narrative into mainstream development models, through a collaborative action framework. 205 million acres, a quarter of India’s landmass, is covered by community forests, pastures and water bodies. These land and water Commons are deeply intertwined with people’s lives and livelihoods, are associated with traditional institutions of self-governance, and are central to climate action and resilient rural economies. Through clearly defined pathways and intervention strategies, Common Ground aims to purposefully tackle the system level barriers and opportunities faced by several organisations and initiatives in the environmental governance and rural livelihoods domain, to amplify impact at scale.   
 
By building connections, processes, and shared knowledge systems, and by convening and connecting actors at various levels (local to national), across thematic domains (water, forests, pastures, fisheries, climate, rural livelihoods) and across functional domains (government, business, tech initiatives), Common Ground will catalyse the Commons ecosystem for resilient ecological, social and economic outcomes at the local level. 

About the Fellowship role

Common Ground is committed to fostering a comprehensive approach to decentralized governance of commons, with a focus on benefiting both people and ecology. Our initiative aims to create a broad coalition of stakeholders from civil society, government, and markets to promote alignment, coherence, and collaborative action in this field.  
 
The Common Ground initiative functions as a Collaborative of partners, organised into Working Groups. The Public Goods Working Group is working towards a vision for open technology, tech and knowledge infrastructure and tools to serve and empower communities to access and utilise all the relevant information to facilitate inclusive, responsive, context-specific and coherent community planning and action on Commons.     
 
Common Ground is mobilising the ecosystem of actors to create more open-source solutions, open access infrastructures, offline and non-digital mechanisms, etc., that not only enable diverse groups of actors (across domains of water, land, forest, agriculture, biodiversity etc.) to access relevant data but also contribute and build new combinations of information sets. In addition, we believe in enabling communities to co-create such solutions and infrastructures, and contribute, govern and utilize them.   
 
Common Ground is anchoring a collaborative of several partners in order to seed such eco-system of Digital and Knowledge commons. The role of the Digital Public Goods Fellow will be to support the orchestration of this network and ensure effective partnerships, complementarity of solutions, facilitate interface between technology providers and field organisations, and facilitate learning and evolution within the Public Goods working group.   

Fellowship location: Preferably Hyderabad or Bangalore 
Employment: Full-time, one-year Fellowship 
Starting Date: July 2025 
 

Key responsibilities

  • Liaison with the various partners of the initiative, and help shape the products and tools being developed by them   
  • Facilitate the interface between product creators and field partners to ensure the products meet the needs of the communities and partners  
  • Facilitate learning, prototyping workshops, information exchanges, collaborations between the partners online and offline  
  • Support learning and evolution for the technology tools and products being used by other partners in the Collaborative as well as the rest of the ecosystem  
  • Understand and communicate to Common Ground the details of the development processes, roadmap and innovation opportunities for various tools and products  
  • Constantly help expand the sphere of partnerships and innovation beyond the immediate Working Group and support partners to fulfil commitments and meet timelines   
  • Collect and Consolidate data and information on the deployment of the solutions for monitoring impact/ reporting to the Common Ground Network and Partners  
  • Identify new opportunities for funding and partnerships 

Requirements

Experience and education:
  • Minimum of 8 years of experience in the fields of Technology for Impact, Product Management etc.  
  • Experience in managing complex multi-stakeholder projects   
  • Understanding of System Change, Public Policy, Open-Source Technology, Public infrastructure  
  • Professional experience in one or more of these areas is essential: Ecology, Biodiversity, Rural Economy and Development, Forestry, Agriculture, Rural Livelihoods, Rural Governance, Environment, Open-Source technology, Technology for Impact.   
  • Strong analytical and critical thinking skills, with the ability to synthesize complex information and communicate to diverse audiences.  
  • Excellent communication, interpersonal, and facilitation skills, with the ability to build consensus and foster collaboration among stakeholders.  
  • Demonstrated ability to work independently and as part of a team, with a high level of initiative, creativity, and attention to detail.  
  • Preferred Master's degree or equivalent in a relevant field (Technology, Engineering, Public Policy).  
Must Haves:
  • Indian work permit or eligibility to work in India is required. 

About the LGT Impact Fellowship

As part of LGT Venture Philanthropy's and Lightrock's strategic efforts to scale positive impact, the LGT Impact Fellowship was established to provide additional know-how and capacity to portfolio organisations and companies. Each year a limited number of professionals are nominated to work full-time for one year with the organisations and companies supported by LGT Venture Philanthropy and Lightrock in Africa, India and Latin America as per the above job description.
LGT Impact Fellows are part of an enriching cohort of like-minded Fellows. They benefit from various program activities, including a 1-week in-person kick-off workshop, webinars, access to the network and know-how of LGT Venture Philanthropy, etc.

How to apply

Submit your application via the "Apply" button. Please note that we only accept online applications and that multiple applications are not allowed. However, you are invited to mention additional preferences in your application.
Moreover, please make sure to read all information in the application form carefully and answer the questions accordingly (additional information about the questions are marked with "i").