Care Full is a new organisation, founded by Hannah and Ruth, two carers. We set out to explore the role of care in a new economy and how our economy could enable us to care for ourselves, one another and the planet.
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Care Full is a new organisation, founded by Hannah and Ruth, two carers. We set out to explore the role of care in a new economy and how our economy could enable us to care for ourselves, one another and the planet.
Here we have a guest blog from Margaret, part of the Public Voices in AI People’s Advisory Group, a member of the People’s Panel on AI, and previous guest blogger on Baby Boomers and AI and a speech she made at the Turing UK AI Conference.
We came to Connected by Data with a clear idea of what problems our community faced. We’d turned up to countless spaces about young people’s experiences online to find we were the only young people in the room, and the narratives being set about our experiences just weren’t in line with the lived reality of growing up online.
Late last year the team at Brickwall (who produced Connected by Data’s intro video) got in touch with us to ask if we might collaborate on a commission from the Local Government Association (LGA) to put together scripts for a series of videos intended to explain artificial intelligence. Drawing on desk research, interviews and a session at UK Gov Camp, we put together a proposed approach based on three sections: introducing AI, AI in Action, and Implementing AI.
I’ve been appointed to an external advisory panel to support the design of the “digital centre” in DSIT (currently a smooched together combination of GDS, CDDO and i.AI). I put out a call on Bluesky for reckons and pointers that has had quite the response, summarised here by Tim Paul but you should go read all the responses. I want to try here to distil some of the topics, questions and opinions around the design of public services, technology support, and what DSIT needs to do as the “digital centre”.
For a researcher who has spent a little time in the Ivory Tower, and then tried hard to find a career path escaping it, during my time at Connected by Data has been inspiring to see practical examples of how public engagement can shape fairer, more accountable systems of data and AI governance. I have to give a shout out to my favourite design lab and my favourite connected conversation which both shared different approaches to including communities in Ai decision making. This is work I hope to be doing more of, more directly, in the future.
The Department for Education has recently released public attitudes research on what parents and pupils think about AI in education, as part of its announcement of a £4m investment to create a dataset to support building AI tools. This is a bit of a hangover from the previous government (the work was carried out earlier in 2024), but reflective of the current government’s commitment to maximising adoption of AI across the public sector.
Before I dig into the details, I should first say that it’s fantastic to see public sector organisations carrying out public attitudes research to inform how they approach the adoption of AI. This kind of research can be used to prioritise investments, inform governance processes to address anticipated harms, and identify barriers and blockers to adoption, as well as working out how to communicate about governmental plans.
Here I want to pull out some specific insights from the research that highlight considerations for how technology is rolled out for public services, namely about profit sharing; schools as trusted decision makers; and points about equity and choice. Then I’m going to discuss some lessons that should be taken into future similar public engagement exercises, particularly about shifting understanding and acceptance of technology; consulting teachers and workers; and the overall approach we need of “you said, we listened”.
I posted recently about the challenge of adoption of AI by the public sector.
There are two sides to this: how the public sector adopts AI itself, and how the public adopts AI-driven public services.
Data Policy Digest
Hello, and welcome to our 26th Data Policy Digest, bringing you all the latest data and AI policy developments.
We’ll forego the usual fun, folksy intro because DEAR GOD this is already too long (for a change, etc). A new Bill, a new advisory panel on the digital centre of government, lots on health data… To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the only thing worse than there being far too much to talk about would be having nothing to talk about (he says, weeping into his computer keyboard).
Hello, and welcome to our 25th Data Policy Digest, bringing you all the latest data and AI policy developments.
Ah, autumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness - and unhealthy, underwhelming beige buffet bites and warm white wine. Yes, several of us are heading up to Liverpool for Labour Party conference this weekend - if you are too, check out our spreadsheet of data and AI events, or drop me a line if you’d like to meet up.
Hello, and welcome to our 24th Data Policy Digest, bringing you all the latest data and AI policy developments, with something of a back-to-school feel - though it’s not as if, for those of us following data and AI policy, it feels like there was much of a break at all.
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