OpenPecha Projects Working Groups

🤝 Council
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OpenPecha Project

The OpenPecha ecosystem is a collaborative initiative powered by a global community of specialists, developers, and partners. Our work is organized into distinct working groups, each with a clear focus, to efficiently build the open-source software and data that will make Buddhist wisdom accessible to everyone.

WeBuddhist Working Group

This technology team is dedicated to bringing Buddhist wisdom into the daily lives of practitioners worldwide. Their primary responsibility is to develop, maintain, and enhance the user-facing applications that deliver our content.

  • Key Responsibilities:

    • Develop and support the WeBuddhist Practice App, a mobile application for daily practice featuring guided meditations, practice plans, and content linked to authentic scriptures.

    • Build and maintain the WeBuddhist Study Platform, a web-based digital library for in-depth study of interconnected Buddhist texts, commentaries, and translations.

    • Create and manage the WeBuddhist Studio, a portal designed for teachers and content creators to build and publish practice plans for the WeBuddhist Practice App.

WeBuddhist Study Content Working Group

This team of Buddhist domain specialists ensures the integrity, accuracy, and accessibility of the scriptures and scholarly materials that form the core of the OpenPecha ecosystem. They are the curators of the digital library.

  • Key Responsibilities:

    • Use the Buddhist AI Tools Studio to proofread, clean, and verify digitized source texts.

    • Produce and review translations of canonical texts to expand the library’s reach.

    • Structure and enrich the content for the WeBuddhist Study Platform, ensuring all materials are properly cataloged and interconnected.

Buddhist Creator Partnerships Working Group

This team focuses on “Scaling Engagement” by fostering a vibrant ecosystem of content creators who can bring Buddhist teachings to life for a diverse global audience.

  • Key Responsibilities:

    • Build and maintain partnerships with Buddhist teachers, influencers, and institutions through the WeBuddhist Partners Program.

    • Develop and deliver the “Digital Dharma” Workshop Series to train partners on creating high-quality digital content.

    • Drive the creation of engaging practice plans and other materials for the WeBuddhist Practice App by supporting partners using the WeBuddhist Studio.

Buddhist AI Tools Studio Working Group

This technology team builds the essential infrastructure that empowers our content teams and the broader community to process and translate Buddhist knowledge at scale.

  • Key Responsibilities:

    • Develop and maintain a suite of community-driven editors and tools for translation, proofreading, cataloging, and aligning Buddhist texts.

    • Create specialized tools for generating AI training data, such as OCR and audio transcription verifiers.

    • Manage the training and benchmarking of custom Buddhist AI models to improve efficiency and accuracy across the ecosystem.

Buddhist Data API Working Group

This team is responsible for “Scaling Reach” by packaging OpenPecha’s vast collection of curated data and making it freely available to the world through a robust and accessible API.

  • Key Responsibilities:

    • Engineer and maintain the Buddhist Open Data & API, ensuring it is reliable, well-documented, and scalable.

    • Serve structured Buddhist data to internal products, including the WeBuddhist Applications and the Buddhist AI Tools Studio.

    • Enable third-party developers, researchers, and other Buddhist organizations to build new applications and services using our open data, amplifying our impact globally.

Buddhist Data Working Group

This team of language and data specialists creates the high-quality, structured “fuel” for OpenPecha’s Buddhist AI models and ensures that this knowledge enriches the world’s public knowledge platforms.

  • Key Responsibilities:

    • Process large collections of source texts by collecting, classifying, cleaning, and enriching the raw materials.

    • Create and annotate training datasets for machine learning, including data for Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Speech-to-Text (STT), and translation models.

    • Populate and enhance Tibetan Wikipedia with reliable, well-sourced entries on Buddhist topics. This involves publishing primary sources on Wikisource and linking all related metadata through Wikidata to create a verifiable and interconnected web of knowledge.

    • Collaborate closely with the Buddhist AI Tools Studio WG to provide the necessary data for training and refining custom AI models.

Sherab E-learning Working Group

This team develops and maintains the Sherab E-learning Platform, providing users with structured, self-paced courses on Buddhist studies, languages, and related skills from leading institutions and Dharma centers.

  • Key Responsibilities:

    • Build, ship, and maintain the web and mobile applications for the Sherab E-learning Platform.

    • Provide technical support and tools for course creators and institutional partners who publish content on the platform.

User Communities Working Group

This group acts as the crucial bridge between our product users and development teams, ensuring that all OpenPecha products are community-driven and aligned with real-world needs.

  • Key Responsibilities:

    • Manage the user communities for each product (WeBuddhist, Buddhist AI Tools, Sherab) to gather feedback, feature requests, and bug reports.

    • Systematically convey community priorities to the technology working groups to guide the bi-weekly development sprints.

    • Communicate product updates, new releases, tutorials, and other relevant information back to the user community through various channels (forums, podcasts, how-to guides).

    • Includes the Release Train Engineer (RTE) who facilitates the agile development process based on community input.

Contributor Community Working Group

This group nurtures and manages the global community of volunteers who contribute their technical and domain expertise to the OpenPecha project, forming the backbone of our open-source initiative.

  • Key Responsibilities:

    • Onboard, guide, and support Code Contributors: Volunteer developers, AI specialists, and other tech experts who contribute to our open-source repositories.

    • Coordinate and support Data Contributors: Volunteer domain specialists who assist with data creation, annotation, and verification tasks.

Council Operation Working Group

This team provides the essential administrative, financial, and operational support that enables all other working groups to function effectively and sustainably.

  • Key Responsibilities:

    • Manage financial operations, including accounting, donations, and grant administration.

    • Ensure legal compliance and handle all aspects of project governance.

    • Oversee administrative functions that are essential for the smooth operation of the OpenPecha project.