Work we're involved in
How can the voices of affected communities be placed more central to AI governance?
Building on discussions at the Participatory AI Research & Practice Symposium (PAIRS) alongside the India AI Impact Summit, and with a view towards the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance, and next AI Summit, both due to be held in Geneva in 2026 and 2027 respectively, we are supporting the development of a coalition to explore practical approaches that can centre citizen voice in global AI governance.
How can different publics and civil society play a greater role in the procurement of AI-driven systems in the public sector? How can AI procurement decisions include the voices of the most affected communities? In partnership with ParticipationAI, we’ve been working on developing a set of principles for public participation in AI Procurement.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and digital technologies are rapidly evolving and complex issues that have wide-ranging implications across sectors and workplaces. While there are overarching concerns, union and policy responses are more effective when tailored to reflect the specific contexts of different industries, technology applications, impact on workers, regulatory regimes and ethical concerns.
The official push to roll out AI in education (among every other area…) throws up sticky questions of pedagogy, practicality and professionalism. Yet too often the voices of educators – support staff, teachers, school leaders and specialists – are squeezed out by the promises of Edtech products offering to solve everything from attainment to attendance.
We are working with DfE to develop a creative engagement toolkit to support participatory sessions with children and young people (ages 10–18) in schools, colleges, youth groups, and community settings. The toolkit will help facilitators gather youth perspectives on generative AI in education, with a focus on what they want technology companies to consider.
Our goal is a pluralist, equitable, democratic future where AI development is bent towards the public interest. This requires the embedding of participatory practice and the voice of affected communities in how we build, govern and respond to AI.
We co-organised the first Participatory AI Research and Practice Symposium at the AI Action Summit in Paris in 2025 as a space to bring together researcher, practitioners, policy makers, activists and industry to share learning on embedding participatory approaches to AI development, governance and resistance.
Over the coming year we will be dedicating time to the next edition of PAIRS, and to developing PAIRSx events that look at participatory AI in different thematic communities.
Communities are affected daily in both positive and negative ways by data governance decisions made by local and national governments. These arise through interactions with public services such as health and care; schooling; policing and justice; tax and benefits, as well as in more pervasive ways through government’s collection and dissemination of data, statistics and evidence to inform policymaking.
As part of our project on ‘Giving communities a powerful say in public sector data and AI projects’, we’re interested in supporting practitioners – particularly in the public sector – who are engaging the public on data and AI. To that end, we convene up a community of practice.
We believe effective data governance should be: collective, democratic, participatory, deliberative and powerful.
But what should organisations collecting, using or stewarding data, and the communities that data affects, do in order to achieve this? And how can we show that the often dry topic of data governance is something that demands creative and critical engagement?
We’ve been running a multi-stage design lab to explore the creation of a serious game (or games) that can help individuals and organisations to think about planning, running and evaluating collective and participatory data governance activities.
You can find the working draft of the game here.
Over the coming months we’re looking for opportunities to iterate on this resource further, and developing resources to support its use in organisational and workshop settings.
The Data and AI Civil Society Network brings together diverse civil society organisations and campaigners to share and collaborate on policy, campaigns and advocacy on data and AI.
Participants in the Network work for data and AI related policy and practice that is democratic and inclusive, that upholds the highest standards of human rights and brings benefits to communities, societies and the environment.
Find out more and join the Network here: https://data-and-ai-cso-network.org/
Completed projects
Building worker power on AI in telecoms, tech and financial services with the CWU
We’re collaborating with the Communications Workers Union (CWU) to develop the practical skills needed to identify and negotiate the impact of AI on workers in the telecoms, tech and financial services sectors.
Through a series of action-oriented workshops over 5 months, union reps and officers will dig into the concepts and tools of building worker power on data and AI and apply learning in workplaces. We will work towards collective agreements, lasting partnerships between CWU, civil society, and academic allies and the bolstering of the union’s political advocacy on technology.
CONNECTED BY DATA were commissioned by Public Voices in AI to facilitate a People’s Advisory Panel supporting their year long project, following our success with the People’s Panel on AI.
Exploring organisations and projects that give communities voice in governing digital technologies
The Open Government Partnership’s Digital Governance challenge calls for national and local governments to commit to “strengthen transparency and public oversight of AI, automated-decision making, and data protection frameworks” including by “creating specific public participation opportunities”.
To support this, we were commissioned to carry out a mapping of organisations that are developing and leading participatory digital governance activities, and to identify possible examples of participatory digital governance that might inspire new commitments and actions.
AI and data are everywhere in our political discourse and our everyday lives. Shaped properly, the benefits brought by such new technologies could lead to public benefit, with better services and better policies allowing us all to live better lives. But power over AI and data is currently concentrated in a small number of large companies working in their own interests, apparently untouched by questions of democratic accountability, and politicians easily seduced by hype or slowed by panic.
The UN High Level Advisory Board on Artificial Intelligence is calling for new institutional arrangements to support the governance of AI that can deliver against the principle that AI should be governed “for all, by all”.
In parallel, the Coalition for a Global Citizens Assembly have launched plans for a permanent Global Citizens’ Assembly, to address humanity’s greatest challenges.
How could a Global Citizens Assembly on AI work? That’s the question we’ve explored, producing an options paper launched alongside the UN Summit of the Future in September 2024.
CONNECTED BY DATA collaborated with the TUC to develop a comprehensive strategic framework for building labour movement capacity on AI. With a focus on sectors, movement building and interventions through the AI value chain, this ambitious strategic approach charts a path for the TUC to ensure the technology is in the service of workers.
Wales has been central to the UK labour movement, and now unions in Wales and TUC Cymru are grappling with how to shape AI. Connected by Data has been working in partnership with TUC Cymru on a series of initiatives, ranging from research on how workers in Wales are experiencing and engaging with AI and developing training materials. Connected by Data has also been advising TUC Cymru as part of an AI reference group for trade union members of the Workforce Partnership Group, part of the Welsh government’s social partnership approach to working with unions.
Building on this, we’re delivering a project with TUC Cymru on how worker voice can be embedded into emerging processes and policy on procurement of data and AI systems in the public sector in Wales.
The People’s Panel on AI brought together representative members of the public to attend, observe and discuss key events at the AI Fringe, which was held alongside the UK Government’s AI Safety Summit at the beginning of November 2023.
Through a deliberative process facilitated by Hopkins Van Mil the People’s Panel on AI produced a public report giving their verdict on AI and their recommendations to government, industry, civil society and academia for further action.
CONNECTED BY DATA has been commissioned by the International Development Research Center (IDRC) to explore how the Global Data Barometer can be used to provide a baseline and measurement tool for the realisation of the Data Values Manifesto.
Along with creative agency Brickwall, Connected by Data carried out a research and development project for the Local Government Association (LGA) to inform the development of a series of explainer videos on how local government engagement with Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Many different groups around the world are coming to realise the value of collective and participatory data governance. There are strong academic research groups, for example those based at Tilburg University, University of Vienna, and the University of Sheffield. There are excellent think tanks, including the Aapti Institute, Open Data Institute, Ada Lovelace Institute and Research ICT Africa. And there are practitioners embedded within data holders (such as the UK’s National Health Service), working with communities (such as around Open Environmental Data) and operating as consultants (such as Involve or IpsosUK).
There is a huge opportunity for these groups to learn from each other, and to together develop shared resources that are useful for everyone. Our goal with this project is to help that happen. We want to:
We worked with Create Gloucestershire, Active Gloucestershire and Barnwood Trust to organise a one-day county-based conference exploring how data can work better for local communities.
In a comprehensive regular posting - up to twice a month - data policy maestro Gavin Freeguard pulls together all the news, views and gossip from data and AI policy land, with a UK focus.
Connected conversations are a programme of informal, virtual discussion sessions designed to support exploration and learning around the fundamentals of collective, democratic, participatory and deliberative data governance.
Data and AI are changing our world… community led campaigns can reshape how.
We are running a community data campaigns cohort with five wonderful groups. Together we will be exploring through monthly shared learning sessions, access to 1-to-1 advice, and bespoke expert input ways to advance community led campaigns on data.
The labour movement has long been a shaper of technology and innovation. Connected by Data is proud to have contributed to that tradition as a special advisor to the Trades Union Congress’s groundbreaking AI and Employment Bill initiative.
Research ICT Africa (RIA) is running the Africa Just AI project with a three-year grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA). Their intention is to serve as an AI Policy think tank in Africa using knowledge grounded in the historical and contemporary contexts of African countries; advocating for people-centred, beneficial AI innovation; and building local capacity and awareness – not only to develop AI systems, but also to govern them justly.
Connected by Data was been commissioned by Justice Lab (a special initiative of the Legal Education Foundation) to conduct an evaluation of the public deliberation exercise that led to the report Justice Data Matters: Building a public mandate for court data use in order to surface lessons for similar future exercises within and outside the UK justice system.
CONNECTED BY DATA was commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) to improve their understanding of the current landscape and stakeholders they want to support, work with, influence and inspire as they create a new insight and analysis infrastructure to help improve how the ecosystem understands inequalities, and how to solve them.
Over the next year the UK government will be looking at how it replaces GDPR following Brexit, through the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill. At the same time all the major political parties will be developing their manifestos in the run up to the next General Election, scheduled for 2024 if not before.
We think this means there is a unique opportunity to influence the democratic and participatory governance of data, to ensure it works for us all, as part of the UK’s post-GDPR future.
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