On Ground Labs

Designing

Mentor Tooling

Lightweight workflows for research mentorship

Concept designLaunching 2026

Why Mentorship Needs Better Tools

India is rich in research-minded students and mentors, but poor in infrastructure that helps them work side-by-side. Version control, note-taking, citation tracking, ethics approvals, and publishing support are scattered across heavyweight tools that don't adapt well to mentorship.

We're designing minimal, opinionated tooling that keeps mentors and students aligned—from hypothesis to submission—without overwhelming them.

Tooling Pillars

What we're prototyping

Shared working canvas

A unified space for literature, experiments, and reflections that surfaces open questions and suggested next actions for both mentor and mentee.

Snippets to paper

Turning annotated notes and experiment logs into structured drafts, with templates that make publication less intimidating.

Mentorship telemetry

Lightweight signals that help mentors see where mentees are blocked, and help institutions evaluate the health of programmes without surveillance.

Co-Design Partners

We're interviewing research mentors, fellowship leads, and student initiative organisers to shape the first release. The work remains self-funded while we co-design the workflows.

Get Involved

Interested in shaping this toolkit? We're looking for a handful of programmes willing to test prototypes ahead of the 2026 launch.

Mentorship programme leads

Graduate labs, fellowships, or student clubs that want tooling aligned with how they actually work.

Design researchers

Folks experienced in building collaborative tools who can stress-test product decisions and flows.

Share your mentorship context by emailing tanay@ongroundlabs.org