IASER Working Groups — Request for Proposals

Last updated 31 July 2026

Islamic Alliance for Safe, Ethical, and Responsible AI · Draft v0.6 · July 2026

1. Why working groups, and why now

IASER launched on 1 July 2026. In its first month, over 100 people applied for membership: AI researchers and engineers, governance and policy professionals, Islamic scholars, ethicists, educators, healthcare specialists, and community builders across more than twenty countries. Collectively they have offered hundreds of volunteer hours per month.

The way we turn that energy into results is working groups: small, focused teams that take on one concrete piece of IASER’s mission and deliver something real — a benchmark, a framework, a guide, an article series, a community.

Everything a working group produces should serve IASER’s five principles, as set out in the IASER Charter:

Safe — AI must be developed and deployed with safeguards that protect human life, dignity, and well-being.
Ethical — AI must reflect moral principles: fairness, dignity, privacy, and truthfulness.
Responsible — those who build and deploy AI bear a trust, and must be accountable for what their systems do.
Active — principles without action are insufficient; when we see harm, we are obligated to act.
Cooperative — this work cannot be done alone; we cooperate with all who share the goal of beneficial AI.

This document explains what we are looking for, how to propose a working group, and how groups will operate once approved. Anyone may propose a working group — you do not need permission to draft a proposal. If you hope to co-lead the group you propose, nominate yourself when its seats open after approval.

2. What an IASER working group is

Small. 3–10 active members plus two co-leads. Small enough that everyone knows what everyone else is doing.
Deliverable-focused. Every group exists to produce something specific and finishable — not to “discuss a topic.” Discussion happens in service of the deliverable.
On its own timeline. Each group’s proposal specifies its own duration and timeline: how long the group expects to run, its milestone schedule, and the date of its first milestone review. Ambitious three-month deliverables and patient year-long scholarship are both welcome — what matters is that the group names its milestones and meets them. At each milestone review, the group continues to the next phase, hands off, or winds down with a short retrospective. There is no shame in a clean ending; there is real cost in a zombie group.
Led by two co-leads in complementary seats: a domain lead who owns the substance of the deliverable (the research, the code, the curriculum, the standard) and a program lead who runs the machine (meeting cadence, monthly progress notes, recruiting, unblocking). These are different skills, and naming them lets domain experts lead without inheriting the admin. Both co-leads remain jointly accountable for the group — the seats are a default division of labor, not a wall — and a group should survive either one stepping back. (Groups with two natural domain co-leads who split the program work between them may charter that way; the seats are the default, not a mandate.)
Self-organizing. Co-leads apply (or propose); members join by self-selection. IASER charters groups and connects people; it does not assign anyone anywhere.
Grounded. Work that makes claims about the Islamic tradition must be sourced and reviewed — groups without their own scholarly capacity will be connected to reviewers rather than left to improvise.
Open by default. Deliverables are published openly (on iaser.ai, GitHub, or both) unless there is a specific reason not to.

3. What we are looking for

We welcome proposals across the full range of IASER’s mission — research, benchmarks, frameworks, education, policy, community, and communications. If you are unsure whether an idea fits, ask: we would rather help shape a rough idea than have it go unproposed.

What a strong proposal has:

A finishable deliverable. “Publish a reviewed framework for X” beats “explore X.” If it can’t be demonstrated at your first milestone, it isn’t scoped yet.
No names — proposals are about the work. A proposal does not name any people, including its leads. Both co-lead seats (a domain lead and a program lead, each typically 5+ hours/month) are filled through the membership nomination process after the proposal is approved.
A self-set duration and timeline you can defend: how long the group runs, its milestone schedule, and why that pace fits the work and the team’s availability.
Islamic grounding appropriate to the topic: which sources anchor the work, and who reviews claims about the tradition.
A defined audience: who uses this deliverable, and how will they find it?
Honest scope: what the group will not do. (Scope discipline is the difference between shipped and stalled.)

What we will decline: open-ended discussion forums; proposals with no deliverable; work that duplicates an existing group (join it instead); anything requiring IASER to take on legal, financial, or safety commitments the organization cannot yet support.

4. How groups form: self-organization

Working groups are staffed by self-selection, not assignment:

Nomination happens after approval. When a proposal is approved and the group’s charter is created — whether from a member’s proposal or an IASER-suggested topic — both co-lead seats (domain lead and program lead) are announced to the membership, and any member may nominate themselves for a named seat. The proposer nominates themselves the same way as anyone else. IASER confirms the two co-leads from the nominees.
Members self-select. Chartered groups are announced with their charter, co-leads, and the skills they’re looking for. Any member may join a group that interests them. Co-leads manage membership within the 3–10 target — if a group overflows, that’s a signal to split the scope or spin up a sibling group.
IASER connects, not conscripts. From the application data we know members’ skills and availability, and we will actively point people at groups that fit them — but joining is always the member’s choice.

5. What IASER provides

People. Announcement of every chartered group and its open roles to the full membership, plus active matchmaking — we know who applied, their skills, and their availability, and we will point members at groups that fit them.
Scholarly review. Connection to scholars and ethicists for grounding and review.
Resources. If your project needs resources (tokens, dollars, etc.), include the amount in your proposal so it can be weighed at review.
Platform. Publication on iaser.ai, the IASER Dispatch newsletter, and IASER’s talks/media channels for finished work.
Infrastructure. GitHub org, meeting tooling, and (where it helps) project-management support from experienced volunteer PMs.
Editorial. Plain-language editing so work reaches beyond a technical audience.

We do not (yet) provide funding. Working groups are volunteer efforts.

6. Process and timeline

Submit a proposal using the template (§7) by email to info@iaser.ai.
Review within two weeks: IASER leadership assesses against the criteria in §3, possibly with a short call. Outcomes: approve, revise and resubmit (with specific feedback), or decline (with reasons).
Charter & nomination. On approval, the draft charter is published as the group’s charter; the co-lead seats are opened to the membership for self-nomination, the two co-leads are confirmed, the charter is finalized with their names, and the group is announced for members to join.
Working phase on the group’s own timeline, with a monthly two-paragraph progress note (what shipped, what’s blocked).
Milestone reviews on the dates the group set: demonstrate the milestone; continue, hand off, or wind down.

7. The template (separate document)

Proposal and charter are one document — your submission IS the draft charter:

Markdown template

Download it, fill it in (under two pages; bullet points welcome — polish is not required, clarity is), and send it to info@iaser.ai. The whole document is public: on approval it is finalized with the confirmed co-leads, published on the member portal, and used as the reference point for milestone reviews.

Sources & references

IASER foundational documents:

IASER Charter — the canonical statement of mission and the five principles (Safe, Ethical, Responsible, Active, Cooperative) that §1 summarizes.
IASER Organizational Design — draft, lives in the IASER shared drive: the Supporter/Member/Fellow structure and projects model this RFP plugs into.

External models this RFP draws on:

CNCF: Charter best practices — Mission, Scope, Values, and Principles — the mission → in-scope/out-of-scope → deliverables → definition-of-success structure used in both templates.
CNCF Cloud Native AI Working Group Charter — a worked example of that structure, including explicit out-of-scope declarations and named liaisons/leads.
OpenSSF project template — the pattern of anchoring each group to a public CHARTER.md with named leads and official communication channels.
MLCommons working groups — the closest analogue to IASER’s technical ambitions: volunteer working groups that ship AI benchmarks (MLPerf, AILuminate); the model for deliverable-owning groups with open membership and self-selected contributors.

Questions? Write to info@iaser.ai. We would rather help you sharpen a rough idea than receive a polished proposal for the wrong thing.