Data and AI Public Engagement Community of Practice – a summary

Since July 2024, we’ve been running a monthly community of practice for people who are trying to engage the public around data and AI. That was part of our project, ‘Giving communities a powerful say in public sector data and AI projects’, funded by the Mohn Westlake Foundation, which has now come to an end. (You can find lots more resources from that, such as case studies and event write-ups, here.)

Over seventeen events, we’ve heard from some great speakers talking about their projects engaging the public on data and AI – how they did them, what they’ve achieved, what the challenges were, and what they’ve learned. Notes of all our meetings are available to people signed up to the community, along with some videos of presentations. Some speakers have been able to let us share their presentations more widely – these are all embedded below. There’s also a list of all our speakers at the bottom of this post, with links to their work (where possible).

Some of the themes or questions that kept coming up across the events included:

• How to recruit diverse voices, and value their contributions (including through payment)
• How to help people engage with complex tech questions, especially given the speed of development, and given some find it boring, including connecting the issues to political narratives – the need for storytelling
• How to talk about ‘AI’ when it’s a term that covers many different things
• The importance of co-creation from the start
• How to convince leaders of the value of public engagement
• How to ensure there is a legacy, that decision makers honour the outputs of public deliberation, and to keep people involved in a project or process
• How technology can help with deliberative and participatory exercises
• The need to share resources and learning

Case studies of public involvement

We’ve been really lucky to have heard about how people went about running various brilliant public involvement initiatives, and what they learned as a result. Hopefully you’ll be able to draw inspiration and insight from them, too.

In October 2025, Giles Lane from the Royal Academy of Engineering presented on their People’s AI Stewardship Summits. These five public dialogues run across the UK – Belfast, Glasgow, Liverpool, Swansea and London – brought members of the public, innovators, entrepreneurs and experts together to explore how the public feels about the implications of AI, and ensure their voices are heard by those working on it. You can read the notes and Q&A, too.

The following month, November 2025, we heard about two quite different projects. First, Jonny Harper, director at Thinks (an insight and strategy consultancy), talked us through their public dialogue for the Home Office on the use of AI in policing. Members of the public considered three different use cases (answering non-urgent 101 calls, finding patterns in datasets, predictive policing) and came up with four positive principles and four things to watch out for.

Then, Sandeepa Arora, a postdoc at The Mohn Centre for Children’s Health and Wellbeing at the School of Public Health, Imperial College London, discussed ‘Data Detectives: 10-year-olds’ views on their health data and how it should be used’. The project’s starting point was that transparency around the use of our data is an essential right that children should be able to access too, and wondered what would happen if children were asked about data. They helped develop a game, ‘Data Detectives’, which allowed them to explore questions around data privacy. You can read the notes from Jonny and Sandeepa’s presentations and Q&A, too.

In December 2025, Janet McLaren from the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data talked about their Data Values Project. This included consulting with people and organisations to develop a Data Values Manifesto – the five calls to action include ‘Support people to shape how they are represented in data’ and ‘Invest in public participation for accountability’ – and supporting Data Values Advocates to bring the manifesto to life in their communities.

In February 2026, we heard from Rachel Astall from Beam, the company behind the Magic Notes (now Beam Notes) casework transcription tool. Beam worked with Nesta on a public deliberation process to understand public attitudes towards the use of the tool – the AI Social Readiness Advisory Label. Focus groups and deliberative polling found that 74% of people agreed that the benefits outweighed the risks – and identified possible inaccuracies and overreliance being the most concerning risks.

And in March 2026, Connected by Data’s own Tim Davies ran through some of our work, namely:

• Participatory data governance in practice, which involved creating a library of case studies
• People’s Panel on AI, a deliberative exercise hosted by Connected by Data around the AI Safety Summit UK in November 2023, which offered a proof of concept about how to do an agile deliberative process
• Community campaigns on data, where we explored how we can support communities to develop plans of action and advocacy around data, creating a toolkit
• The Good Governance Game, a card game to help people explore different methods of participation
• Generative AI in Education - Have Your Say, where we developed a “workshop in a box” to enable teachers to run sessions contributing to a distributed dialogue to understand students views on generative AI in education
• Participatory AI Research & Practice Symposium (PAIRS), an international community of people interested in participatory practice around AI which ran online and in-person in 2025, and online and in-person in 2026.

How to do public engagement well

We also had several presentations around how to do public engagement and solving particular challenges.

In February 2025, Maddie Gough and Elizabeth Cunningham from Involve talked about how they approach public engagement. They covered some key themes of good engagement – Clear purpose, Properly resourced, Accessible and inclusive, Gift of thanks and expenses, Balanced information, Accountable decision makers – before discussing the IAP2 spectrum of engagement and different methods. They also shared a couple of case studies: working with Camden Council on their Data Charter, and with Sciencewise on a project called ‘Future Flight 2’ to understand public views on technologies like drones.

In January 2025, we had two speakers focus on how to engage different communities, including historically excluded ones. Henrietta Hopkins, director of Hopkins van Mil (a social research agency specialising in deliberation), shared three case studies: Trust in Digital Identity Services (DSIT/Sciencewise), the Citizens’ Biometric Council (Ada Lovelace Institute) and Grown up? Journeys to adulthood (Nuffield Foundation/Ada Lovelace Institute). She said that some of the key themes were the importance of co-creating the process, creating safe and trusted spaces (in a physical sense, and in terms of facilitation), recognising those taking part were likely to be impacted by the topic, targeted outreach and working with gatekeepers to reach the people that matter, and ethics and safeguarding.

Emily Rempel, then Public Participation Manager at Liverpool City Region Civic Data Cooperative, also used three case studies: Round ‘ere (on what we should be collecting to begin with), Community data conversations (how to engage with minoritised groups), and the Residents’ assembly on data and AI innovation (intended to be as broad and welcoming as possible). Her tips for avoiding only engaging a WHIMS population (white, healthy, in retirement, middle class, skilled) were negotiating time and relationships, humility (something she’d also encountered working with First Nations people on a health data project in Canada), fair payment, working with and not for, and throwing things at the wall to see what worked. (Emily also spoke at Data Bites about the residents’ assembly, and at our conference.)

In October 2025, Connected by Data associate Anna Beckett presented on how to evaluate a deliberative exercise – specifically, the Liverpool Residents’ Assembly that Emily had run. She said that evaluations can be formative (shaping the thing they are evaluating) or summative (summarising what happened) and can focus on process (what happened) or impact (what happened as a result). A formative approach – engaging the evaluator from the start – could be most valuable, as it allows real-time feedback to shape the exercise (though there is a risk of ‘marking your own homework). A theme of recent evaluations was a lack of AI sceptics in the room – either they don’t engage at all, or start the process and then drop out.

And in June 2025, we focused on the use of technology to support better public engagement. Prateek Buch talked about PolicyLab’s use of Pol.is – although his presentation is not public, you can watch him talk about it at Data Bites in October 2023. Hannah Perry from Demos and Georgina Denis from Psi then talked about the Waves project, which aims to use tech to scale public participation and deliberation. The project is working with the London Borough of Camden and South Staffordshire council to pilot approaches, and has a learning network for other interested councils. You can sign up for more recent updates via Demos.

All previous speakers

1: July 2024

• Robin Carpenter, Ethics and Governance Lead for the AI Centre for Value Based Healthcare and King’s College London, on Collaborating well with patients when developing healthcare AI
• Elizabeth Nelson, Public Engagement, Communications and Impact Manager at Administrative Data Research Centre Northern Ireland, on ‘Co-producing data-driven research with historically excluded groups’

2: October 2024

• Dr. Michaela Omelkova, Data Ethics Advisor, Scottish Government, on their public dialogues on data and CivTech challenge on the use of technology in public participation on the use of data and AI

We then had something of an education special:

• Edward O’Garro-Priddie, Delivery Lead, and Jake Luscombe, Lead Data Scientist, Faculty, on the AI in Education Hackathon
• Dea Begaj, Public Attitudes Researcher, Responsible Technology Adoption Unit, on research on parent and pupil attitudes towards the use of AI in education
• Fay Skevington, Head of AI Alignment for Education, Data Directorate in the Department for Education, on how collaborative engagement on data has shaped policymaking.

Connected by Data has subsequently done lots more work with the DfE, through a distributed dialogue, which you can find at https://connectedbydata.org/ai-in-education/.

3. December 2024

This was a workshop on the question, what do public engagement practitioners need to succeed?

4. January 2025

This focused on how to engage different communities, including historically excluded ones, with:

• Henrietta Hopkins, Director, Hopkins Van Mil
• Emily Rempel, Public Participation Manager, Liverpool City Region Civic Data Cooperative.

5. February 2025

This focused on the different approaches that public engagement practitioners can take - i.e. the menu of different options for public involvement. The speakers were:

• Maddie Gough, Engagement Lead and Elizabeth Cunningham, Engagement Lead – Science, Technology and Data from Involve
• Sam Nutt, Researcher & Data Ethicist, London Office of Technology and Innovation.

6. March 2025

This celebrated the first year of the project, and featured reflections and discussion from:

• Sylvie Hobden and Dea Begaj from DSIT
• Annie Radcliffe from the LGA
• Shayda Kashef from ADR UK.

7. April 2025

This heard from the Ada Lovelace Institute’s Eleanor O’Keeffe, Roshni Modhvadia and Helena Hollis, who spoke about their work as part of the ESRC Digital Good Network’s recent Public Voices in AI project.

8. May 2025

• Julian Tait from Open Data Manchester, on developing principles for putting residents at the heart of how automated decision making is used
• Louise Petre from the Government Digital Service, on the role of user research in understanding and improving the relationships we build around and with data.

9. June 2025

This focused on the use of technology in public engagement, with:

• Hannah Perry from Demos and Georgina Denis from PSi talking about the Waves project
• Prateek Buch from PolicyLab.

10. July 2025

• Frederica Longfoot **and **Eli Holderness about the public engagement work of OpenSAFELY.

11. September 2025

• Tracey Brown talking about Sense About Science’s Responsible Handover Framework.

12. October 2025

• Giles Lane from the Royal Academy of Engineering on their People’s AI Stewardship Summits
• Anna Beckett on evaluating Liverpool’s Residents’ Assembly.

13. November 2025

• Jonny Harper, Director at Thinks, about their recent AI in policing project
• Sandeepa Arora, Postdoc at The Mohn Centre for Children’s Health and Wellbeing, School of Public Health, Imperial College London, on ‘Data Detectives: 10-year-olds’ views on their health data and how it should be used’.

14. December 2025

• Helen Miller-Bakewell and David Ross from the Office for Statistics Regulation talking about their new public involvement and engagement in official statistics toolkit for statistics producers
• Janet McLaren from the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, on ‘Centering People in Data Governance: Lessons from the Data Values Campaign’.

15. January 2026

• Anna Steere from Understanding Patient Data presenting on ‘why tracking sentiment matters for health data policy’.

16. February 2026

• Louis Horsley, Research and Insight Manager at National Voices, on the ‘Underrepresentation of ethnic minority data in genomic medicine’
• Rachel Astall, Chief Commercial Officer at Beam, on the AI Social Readiness Advisory Label, a first-of-its-kind public deliberation process led by Nesta to evaluate the risks and benefits of AI tools in public services

17. March 2026

• Tim Davies, Research and Practice Director at Connected by Data, on our work on participation around data and AI.