On Wednesday 11 February 2026 at 2pm we will hold the sixteenth meeting of a community of practice as part of our project on Giving communities a powerful say in public sector data and AI projects.
It’s designed to bring together people across the public sector working on (or interested in) engaging the public on data and AI, with those in civil society, the private sector and academia working in the field. It’ll be a safe space to hear about what others are doing and work through common challenges.
The network meets on a Chatham House basis (nothing attributed unless you want it to be, anything confidential excluded altogether), with notes circulated within the network. We do something similar with an existing data and AI civil society network, and have lots of existing links with public engagement practitioners.
In our first and second events, we had presentations from practitioners engaging the public. Our third event was an online workshop around the question, what do public engagement practitioners need to succeed? Our fourth event had presentations on how to engage different communities, including historically excluded ones, and our fifth presentations on different methods for involving the public. Our sixth event asked what’s next for public involvement on data and AI and our seventh heard about outputs from a recent Public Voices in AI programme. Our eighth meeting received inputs from Open Data Manchester and the Government Digital Service. Our ninth meeting looked at using tech tools to support public engagement, the tenth discussed health data and the eleventh learned from Sense about Science. The twelfth was about evaluating Liverpool’s Residents’ Assembly and the Royal Academy of Engineering on their People’s AI Stewardship Summits and the thirteenth heard about AI in policing and 10-year-olds’ views on their health data. The fourteenth had presentations from the Office for Statistics Regulation and The Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data. Our last meeting heard from Understanding Patient Data on ‘why tracking sentiment matters for health data policy’.
Our confirmed speaker is:
- Louis Horsley, Research and Insight Manager at National Voices
- 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’
Please register here to attend this meeting. To keep informed about this work and receive meetings invitations and details please sign up to our mailing list.
The future of the Community of Practice Connected by Data has been running the Data and AI Public Engagement Community of Practice since July 2024, to allow people to share their work and learn from others on engaging the public around data and AI, work through common challenges, and bring together practitioners from different sectors.
The 15 events to date – monthly online meetings for around one hour, 2pm on a Wednesday – have largely consisted of two presentations, but we have also run an online workshop and a panel discussion.
The Community of Practice is part of a wider project and funding for that project ends in March 2026, while Connected by Data – always intended to be a five-year campaign – is due to come to an end in March 2027.
That means we are considering what happens next to the community of practice – in terms of maintaining the archive of presentations to date, and how and where (and whether) to continue it. We ask you to take a little time to complete a survey on your thoughts. The survey is available in Google Forms or MS Forms format. Your answers to this survey will help inform the next steps.