Zero-Shot Image Classification:
A week is really a very short time for multiple project goals. But, yes, I am willing to discuss more.

Uploading the data
Surprisingly, the authors of the paper do not mention a License for the dataset. But they do not explicitly forbid the use of the dataset for any purposes.
In the Dataset 1 README, it is mentioned 1 that-

RSICD is used for remote sensing image captioning task. The detailed information about this dataset can be found in our paper “Exploring Models and Data for Remote Sensing Image Caption Generation”.
If you use our dataset, please cite our paper above.

So, they are expecting a citation, which is perfect.
So, I think it would be safe to add their dataset without their explicit permission if we cite them properly.

Communication:
A dedicated Discord sounds perfect. In such projects, it is very important to have screen-sharing and voice calling capabilities. Discord has all that.

Model:
Yes absolutely. We should read the paper first and then host a session to talk about it, and clear doubts. We can look at other examples.

Additional Comments:
We need to have a very good understanding of the structure of the dataset so that we can get started with it. It is very important to create a baseline first and then improve upon it.