Community Campaigns on Data Toolkit
I started the week accepting the final updates to the Community Campaigns on Data Toolkit I’ve been working on to capture learning from our Luminate funded Catalysing Community Campaigns programme over the last year. It’s very much a working draft, that we’re hoping to have the opportunity to build on further next year - and I’ll write up a bit more about it soon. It was really encouraging last week to get positive feedback (and some great constructive edits) from Tamanda Walker who we met through the Community Campaigns cohort, and who we had invited to review the draft.
You can find the toolkit here as a Google Doc.
Scrutiny on local government AI
Back when we were exploring AI explainers for local government earlier in the year I spoke with Cllr Chloe Turner of Stroud District and Gloucestershire County Council. A few weeks ago, Chloe alerted me to the digital strategy being put before the council Cabinet this week, so I took the opportunity to prepare some written questions. The answers contain some interesting detail about council trials with CoPilot and the social care transcription tool MagicNotes, a link to the council’s Generative AI Policy, and a note that:
DPIA and combined AI Impact Assessments will steer project leads towards research and public engagement to better understand the potential impact.
They also highlight where the council is currently going for information and support on AI - information that could be useful for civil society groups thinking about how to engage with and influence council thinking on data and AI use.
Staff are engaging with different communities of practice and specialists in this area including a local government network on use of Microsoft Copilot, the Local Government Association (LGA), Southwest Cyber Resilience Centre, the Regional Organised Crime Unit, West Midlands Governance Group, Gloucestershire Information Governance Group, SWAARP and others.
Staff also attend sector specific events organised by various forums and organisations such as Socitm and Microsoft to learn from others and share good practice.
Council constitutes vary with regards to whether and how members of the public can ask questions - but in many cases, council questions can be a really useful and constructive tool to both demonstrate public interest in an issue to officers and councillors, and to get timely information to help plan future engagement.
Participatory AI Research Symposium
We’ve had over 80 abstract submitted for the Participatory AI Research Symposium we’re co-organising as an unofficial fringe of the French AI Action Summit taking place in February next year. It’s been a real privilege to work with a fantastic programme committee, who bring a range of perspectives on participatory AI development, governance and resistance - and I’m really looking forward to seeing how the programme starts to shape up later this week.
Having not had the opportunity to write any code for almost two years, I’ve also enjoyed digging out some old Google Apps script resources to hack together a review tool (generating and sharing with reviewers docs for each row in a google sheet, and importing reviews back into the spreadsheet). Fingers crossed it keeps working, and we’ll have 2 x 80 reviews completed this week!
National Data Library Design Lab
On Thursday we hosted our latest design lab workshop, exploring potential routes for participatory practice to influence the work of the emergent National Data Library. Along with a number of the National Data Library team from DSIT, we had brought together a mix of participation and data stewardship practitioners from across academia, government, voluntary and private sectors, and civil society groups thinking about the impacts of data. Although, as full details of the shape the National Data Library initiative is going to take are not yet shared, it was difficult at times to anchor and ground the discussion, it felt like a productive exploration of both the different approaches that can be taken to engaging publics around data, and to some of the opportunities and challenges of doing this work at a more infrastructural level.
Emily has ably transcribed the mountain of post-it notes we generated, and I’ll be getting stuck into a write-up early next week.
I did find myself in my own reflections calling back to past arguments about the importance of recognising the social construction of datasets, and this work for the Open Data Institute on Data Portals and Citizen Engagement where we looked at the importance of moving ‘from pinch point to pyramid’ in the way we think about data intermediary layers.
It was perhaps the resonance of running the workshop in the Trampery - a venue I think I was last in almost a decade ago for an open data hackathon - which also led me to reflect on the need to better understand the history of open data and data sharing efforts in the last (at least) 30 years when thinking about the role a National Data Library might play.
Connections and concept notes
On Wednesday evening, down in London ahead of the NDL design lab, I had a chance to catch up on a few rather overdue concept notes for possible side-projects: one to explore a possible Hawkwood Climate Action Lab on AI, and another to look at processes around how permissions (or not) to be in photos are handled in schools. I didn’t quite manage to complete them, but closer to having ideas on paper ready to explore more in the new year.
Gloucestershire Data Day
In addition to the Create Gloucestershire board meeting on Tuesday, over this week I’ve been getting more stuck into final prep for Gloucestershire Data Day: now just over a week away.
Life
The week outside work has also been fairly eventful. My son is moving schools after Christmas, so it’s been a week of visits to prepare for that, and working out how to wrap up my role as parent governor at the school he is leaving. In between school visits, dodging the rain on my electric cargo bike (and in an effort to become as much of a Stroud cliche as I possibly can) I cycled up to collect our first veg share as new members of Stroud Community Agriculture.
Our long-running house retrofit project (started in April) also reached a milestone this week with the Air Source Heat Pump plumbed in and wired up at last. We’re hopefully just a truck-load of rockwool and render, a bit of decorating, and some snagging away from being able to move back in.