PSIR_Forum_Project_Profile

PSIR Forum Political Science and International Relations Forum Ideas. Debate. Global Perspectives. Project Profile Prepared by: Shambel Tesfaw Kibret Kombolcha, Ethiopia November 2026 Beta version. Official launch planned within the next two weeks. [email protected] | psirforum.vercel.appPSIR Forum | Project Profile Executive Summary PSIR Forum is an independent online community for students, graduates, lecturers, researchers and practitioners who are interested in political science, international relations, diplomacy, governance, peace and security, and African affairs. The platform was conceived and built by Shambel Tesfaw Kibret, who develops and moderates it from Kombolcha, Ethiopia. It is currently in beta, and its official launch is planned within the next two weeks, in November 2026. The project brings several academic activities into one connected environment. Members can take part in open discussions, submit research papers to a moderated library, read news and analysis that cite their sources, join live rooms for seminars and debates, and find free courses, scholarships and job opportunities that have been checked before they are listed. These parts are designed to reinforce one another. A student who reads a research paper can start a discussion about it, a lecturer who shares an opportunity can reach the graduates who need it, and a researcher who publishes can find readers beyond their own campus. PSIR Forum does not set out to replace universities, academic journals or professional associations. It aims to complement them: to keep academic conversation alive between classes and after graduation, and to give the wider PSIR community an open, moderated and free space to meet. The platform is currently funded by its founder and has no external grants or sponsors. Figure 1: PSIR Forum home page [email protected] |PSIR Forum | Project Profile Introduction and Background Political science and international relations are disciplines built on conversation. Students learn by arguing about what they have read, researchers test their ideas against the criticism of their peers, and practitioners in government, civil society and international organisations keep their understanding current by talking with scholars and with each other. Much of this exchange takes place in lecture halls, seminar rooms and study groups, and it usually stops when a course ends or a student graduates. PSIR Forum grew out of an observation about what happens after that point. Many graduates leave university with a real interest in the field but with few lasting connections to the lecturers who shaped their thinking, few places to keep reading and writing, and little guidance on the courses, scholarships and jobs that could take their work further. The platform was built to respond to those gaps, starting with a shared online space where the PSIR community can continue its work. The platform has been developed in stages. It began as a place for discussion and has since grown to include a research library, a news and journal section, live rooms, and a career section for courses, scholarships and jobs. Each addition was made in response to a specific need, then tested with members and refined before it was relied upon. This practical, step-by-step approach is deliberate: it keeps the platform understandable, and it means each feature has earned its place. The Need for the Platform Three gaps shape the purpose of PSIR Forum. The first is the loss of academic contact after graduation. Students who finish their degrees often lose touch with the lecturers and researchers who guided them. An open forum allows that relationship to continue through questions, comments and shared reading, without requiring formal supervision or an employment arrangement. The second gap is the absence of a common meeting place for the whole community. Students, lecturers and researchers often work in separate spaces. Students seldom see how research is produced, and researchers seldom hear the questions that students are asking. A single platform where all of them can read, post and respond brings these perspectives into the same conversation, and that is where ideas tend to improve. The third gap concerns access to information. Scholarships, courses and job announcements often travel informally, through private messages and word of mouth. Capable students who are not well connected may never hear about them. A checked, public and well-organised listing gives every member the same starting point, regardless of who they already know. Several networks and discussion groups already serve parts of this need. Email lists and social media groups are widely used, but they move quickly, are difficult to search, and rarely keep a record of what was discussed. Academic networking sites are valuable, yet they tend to focus on publications and professional profiles rather than open debate. PSIR Forum brings open discussion, moderated publication and career information together in one place, shaped around the needs of the PSIR community rather than a general audience. [email protected] | Page 1PSIR Forum | Project Profile Vision, Mission and Values Vision. A connected academic community in which students, lecturers and researchers in political science and international relations learn from one another, share knowledge freely, and remain part of the discipline throughout their careers. Mission. To provide an open, moderated and easy-to-use digital platform where members can debate ideas, publish and read research, follow current affairs through sourced reporting and analysis, and find verified opportunities that help them grow. Four values guide this work. The first is academic integrity: every publication cites its sources, the role of moderation is stated openly, and the platform is clear about what it is and what it is not. The second is openness with respect. Differences of opinion are welcome, but harassment, threats and personal attacks are not. The third is accessibility. The platform is free to use, works well on mobile phones, and is available in several languages. The fourth is responsibility, which covers both the protection of members’ personal information and the care taken over what appears on the platform. The platform collects only the information it needs, and it treats security as a standing obligation rather than an occasional task. Objectives The general objective of PSIR Forum is to strengthen academic exchange within the PSIR community, and to keep that exchange alive after students graduate. The first specific objective is to build a discussion community that is active, respectful and open to questions and disagreement, organised around the main areas of the discipline. The second is to create a moderated research library that makes students’ and researchers’ work visible to a wider readership, with each publication clearly identified as moderated rather than peer reviewed. The third is to give students a supported route into publishing, so that they can practise academic writing and reach readers through the news and journal section, with clear guidance on sourcing and presentation. The fourth is to host live academic sessions, such as seminars, research presentations and structured debates, that allow students to speak directly with lecturers, researchers and practitioners. The fifth is to bring free courses, scholarships and jobs together in one place, with each listing checked before it is published, so that members can make informed decisions. The sixth is to make the platform usable in the languages of its members. The interface is available in English, Amharic, Tigrinya, Afaan Oromo and Af Somali, and the translations for the last three are being reviewed by native speakers before the official launch. Target Groups and Beneficiaries PSIR Forum is open to everyone in the political science and international relations community. Its main beneficiaries are the groups described below, and each gains something different from the platform. [email protected] | Page 2PSIR Forum | Project Profile Undergraduate and postgraduate students use the platform to discuss what they are learning, put their questions to people who know the field, publish their writing, and find out about courses and scholarships. Taking part in open discussion and writing for a public audience builds the argumentative and writing skills that the discipline demands. Recent graduates use it to stay connected to their former lecturers and classmates, to continue their reading and research, and to follow the opportunities that suit their next step. For many, the platform becomes the place where a degree continues to mean something after the final examination. Lecturers and teaching assistants can post open questions, share additional reading with students, meet graduates, and present their own work to a broader audience. The platform gives teachers a way to extend their teaching beyond the timetable. Researchers and policy analysts use the research library to publish their work, receive feedback from readers, and connect with others working on similar questions. The moderation process, while not peer review, gives their work a visible, organised home. Organisations and employers working in the PSIR field may share job and internship opportunities once they have been verified by an administrator. This helps them reach candidates who are interested in the discipline, without relying on broad, untargeted advertising. Members of the public who follow world affairs can read sourced news and analysis, take part in open discussions, and attend live sessions. The platform is designed so that a curious reader with no academic background can still find something useful and understandable. Main Features and Services PSIR Forum offers five main areas. Each one works on its own, but they share a single purpose: to keep academic life going beyond the classroom. The discussion area is organised by topic, including International Relations, Diplomacy and Foreign Policy, Peace and Security, Governance and Public Policy, and African Affairs. Members ask questions, offer perspectives, answer one another, and can mark a reply as the helpful answer. Members can report content that breaks the community guidelines, and those reports are reviewed by a moderator. [email protected] | Page 3PSIR Forum | Project Profile Figure 2: Discussion topic categories Figure 3: Community discussions page The Research Hub is a library for research papers, policy briefs, academic articles, literature reviews and theses. An author submits a paper, which is checked by a moderator, and only approved papers appear in the library. Authors can attach a PDF and a cover image. Every publication carries a clear statement that it has been moderated, not formally peer reviewed. The News and Journal section has two kinds of content. News items are short, timely updates, and each one must name its original source. Journal items are longer pieces of analysis, opinion or essays. Both are checked before they appear, and a cover image can be attached to either. [email protected] | Page 4PSIR Forum | Project Profile Figure 4: News and Journal section Live rooms provide space for seminars, research presentations and debates. Each category has its own room, and members are notified when a session is scheduled. Participants join through the browser, without installing additional software, and can choose whether their microphone and camera are on. The Career section brings together free online courses, scholarships and job opportunities. Each listing is checked before publication. Members read the details on PSIR Forum and then apply or enrol through the provider’s own website, so that the official process stays with the organisation concerned. [email protected] | Page 5PSIR Forum | Project Profile Figure 5: Career section – courses Figure 6: Career section – job listings How the Platform Works The platform is built on widely used online services. These were chosen because they are reliable, affordable at the current stage, and can be expanded as the community grows. Each service has a clear role, and together they form a system that members experience as a single website. Vercel hosts the website. It delivers pages quickly to visitors wherever they are, and it works the same way on a mobile phone and a desktop computer. Supabase stores the community’s information: member accounts, discussions, research records, news items and career listings. It also holds the security rules that decide who may do what. For example, a member can edit only their own posts, and only moderators and administrators can change another member’s role or approve a submission. GitHub holds the program code and runs the automated tasks that keep the platform safe. A daily job makes an encrypted copy of the database, and a weekly job checks that the copy can be restored. ImageKit stores and resizes the cover images used in the news and journal section, so that pages load quickly on slower connections. Infomaniak’s kMeet service provides the video rooms used for live sessions. Google Drive holds the encrypted daily backups in a private folder, and the key needed to open them is kept separately from the backups themselves. Telegram and Facebook are used for community announcements and conversation beyond the platform. The main discussions, publications and records remain on PSIR Forum itself. [email protected] | Page 6PSIR Forum | Project Profile Figure 7: Online services and community channels that support the platform (illustrative overview) Current Capacity PSIR Forum is in beta. Its main parts work, and some details are still being tested. This section describes what the platform can do today and the technical limits of the free infrastructure it currently uses. It does not quote membership or publication counts, because those change from week to week. The figures in Table 1 are estimates based on the published allowances of the services the platform uses. Table 1: Current estimated technical capacity Item Estimated capacity Basis and notes Registered users No fixed account limit The platform does not cap the number of accounts. Monthly active users Up to 50,000 Free-plan authentication allowance of the database service. Simultaneous realtime connections Up to 200 Free-plan realtime allowance. Database storage 500 MB Holds member accounts, discussions, research records, news items and career listings. File storage (Supabase) 1 GB Holds the research PDFs and private files that are stored in the database service. Maximum individual file upload 50 MB (plan ceiling) The platform itself accepts research PDFs up to 10 MB, cover images up to 5 MB, and CVs up to 5 MB. Monthly data transfer (Supabase) 5 GB Limits how much content can be downloaded in one month. Academic PDFs About 200–500 documents Assumes 2–5 MB per PDF within the 1 GB file storage. [email protected] | Page 7PSIR Forum | Project Profile Item Estimated capacity Basis and notes Images About 1,000–5,000 images Assumes 200 KB–1 MB per image. Cover images are hosted on ImageKit, which has its own allowance. Text discussions About 20,000–50,000 posts A rough estimate. It depends on message length and how the database is structured. Comments and replies Tens of thousands Depends on how the database is used. Image storage and bandwidth (ImageKit) Separate allowance Covers the news and journal cover images. Checked against the ImageKit plan. Document backups (Google Drive) Separate from the database Encrypted daily backups kept in a private folder. Limited by the storage available to the Google account. Website hosting (Vercel) Hobby plan limits Separate bandwidth and execution limits. The Hobby plan is intended for non-commercial use. These are estimates based on published free-tier allowances, not verified performance limits. Actual capacity depends on how the application is built, the size of the files, the efficiency of the database, and the pattern of traffic. The estimates will be checked against real usage after the official launch. Members can register, sign in, keep a profile, and add an academic profile and photo if they wish. In the discussion area they can post questions, reply, mark helpful answers, save posts, and report content. Writers can submit research papers, news items and journal articles for review, and approved work is published with its sources and a clear statement of how it was checked. The career section accepts courses, scholarships and jobs, and each is reviewed before it appears. Listings with a deadline are removed once it has passed. Where a link allows, the platform can read the title, description and thumbnail of a listing automatically; where a website does not allow this, the member completes the details by hand. Administrators and moderators review submissions, reports and employer requests. Each decision is recorded with the reason and the time, so that the history of the platform can be understood later. The platform keeps daily encrypted backups and tests them every week. It also records unexpected errors, so that problems can be found and corrected quickly. Table 2: Status of the main features at the time of writing Area Status at the time of writing Member accounts, sign-in and profiles Available Discussions and replies Available Research Hub: submission, review and library Available News and Journal Available Live rooms for seminars and debates Available; sessions being introduced [email protected] | Page 8