Hey thanks for considering contributing to ML Collective! If you identify as an experienced researcher — e.g. you have published ML papers, you are familiar with how research is done, you've had research trainings from academia or industry, etc., there are plenty you can do to share your experience, give back to the community, and find likeminded people that you'd have fun chatting once in a while. We provide a few ways to get started to be involved with MLC. 

## But first, what is your bandwidth?
It might be worth thinking beforehand **how much time you can commit to giving to MLC**. It could be any number of hours per week/month/quarter/year, and no one would explicitly hold you accountable to it, but it would just be a useful thing to think through before you make the commitment, and it should be the biggest determinant  of what types of commitment you'd want to make. It also doesn't have to be a constant across time, something like "a linear curve from 2 hours to 10 hours per week from T-2 months to the submission deadline," or "a step function at T-1 week to the deadline." The key is, you might want to think through that yourself.

A key divider here is whether you are in for a **long-term or semi-long-term involvement**, or you are looking for a **one-off involvement**. There are great things you can do in either. You can also use the latter to figure out if the former is right for you.

## Types of contribution you can to make to the MLC community 
 1. [**Long-term** | **mid-term**] Be an MLC mentor: open to take mentees, meet with them consistently, give them ideas to work on (if needed) and ongoing feedback, and guide them all the way through a publication process. 
 2. [**Long-term** | **mid-term** | **one-off**] Host an [office hour](https://mlcollective.org/services/#mloh). You can pick any topic area you are comfortable with, create your own calendly link with your desired frequency and length, and we will put it on the website!
 3. [**One-off**] Make an [RFP](https://mlcollective.org/rfp/) about a backburner idea you've always had; maybe someone can make it work!
 4. [**Long-term** | **mid-term**] Just be awesome doing your own research, bring it to our lab meeting when it's ready, and use "ML Collective" as your affiliation to make us look good.
 5. [**One-off**] Help write more articles in this [Wiki](https://mlcollective.org/wiki/)! Articles like "How to get started as a ML researcher," "How to keep up with the latest research," "How to write your first paper," "How to give a good talk about your work" are all waiting to be written!
 6. _Anything you can think of that benefits the community!_