Weeknotes
New term, new weeknotes practice. Perhaps.
The power of imagination
Outside of my work at Connected by Data I’ve been working on a paper on Emerging Technology and the Social Contract that we’ll be sharing a first draft of at the World Bank’s Global Forum on Coalitions for Reform in a few weeks time. One of the reasons I took on the assignment, was the brief to write about the opportunities emerging technologies hold, rather than focussing only on critique, which has felt like the greater presence in both my reading and practice over the last few years. I’ve felt like I need more to say about (and to be motivated more by) a sense of how we can shape technologies to serve civic and public good goals, rather that just to focus on the limits. It’s been challenging to say the least.
Although the research for that project (and some of the work I’ve been doing locally in Stroud on community data commons) has surfaced examples of emerging technology being used for civic good - it often feels niche and far from pathways to impact at scale - or still fatally compromised by the biases or flaws of the underlying technologies being redeployed for social ends. So I was really excited to join the latest (m)otherboard book club to discuss Ruha Benjamin’s Imagination: A Manifesto on Tuesday night (well, actually early hours of Weds morning… I didn’t read the timezone when signing up!). The quotation on capitalist realism, invoked in the discussion “it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism” captured for me the current challenge. Dominant technological narratives leave little space for imagining and charting a path to the kinds of alternatives we might have better reasons to value. The discussions underscored the need to both interrogate dominant imaginations of our past, present and future - and to undertake re-imagining as a continual and intentional practice.
(As a side note - I’m much inspired by the (m)otherboard collective’s thoughtful approach to creating community, governance and vision for the future. )
This theme of imagination was also both present, and partly absent, in the sharing event yesterday of a piece of Legislative Theatre created with young people by Thinks for the Department of Education as part of their ongoing exploration of the potential governance model to allow (or restrict) the use of school student’s work in training AI. Imagination was present as students on the stage of a school hall presented a series of dramatic schemes exploring how they may experience algorithms sorting them into educational sets, making homework, or taking their personal creative writing into a dataset for AI training. But it was also perhaps limited, in that the scenes offered and the discussions that followed neither questioned the premise that AI could improve education, nor did they play forward the potential consequences of AI introduction or refusal.
Over the next few weeks I’m going to be working on a set of resources to support school-based participatory discussions around AI, building on the design lab we held in July (report coming soon). Key to that I think will be thinking about the materials and activities needed to provide space for grounded, and free, imagination of different possible futures with and without AI. As without wider imagination of possibilities, we go into moments of agency and choice already constrained.
Houses, Houses, Houses
Over the last few months we’ve been working with Arturo Dell at Knowledge Industries for Peabody Housing to support resident engagement around their new data strategy. It’s been a fascinating process: from early design work thinking about the most relevant questions to ask in order to inform the rapidly evolving strategy process, to finding practical ways to reach residents over the summer holidays, and to get people engaged in conversations about ‘dull sounding data’.
We’ve spoken with Peabody’s Resident Led Panel, attended a drop-in session to have ad-hoc conversations with residents, and last week Jeni facilitated a set of focus group discussions with residents and members of Tenant and Resident Associations. We’ve not reached a large number of people: but it’s been striking how much insight even these few conversations have generated - and what difference it makes to have direct resident voice feeding into the strategy process.
It’s been a powerful reminder for me that, so often, processes of decision making about data are made in ways that don’t have a single affected voice feeding in. And it’s been a proof point that, when questions are framed right (for example, we quickly picked up that from a resident perspective, many issues that to the business are about ‘data’ are experienced in terms of ‘communication’) publics have a lot to say about data.
It’s also been interesting in the project to experiment with LLMs for retrieving evidence from past engagement. For example, once we’d worked out some of the right language (communication, information, privacy) to use, we could drop reports that the Peabody engagement team produced based on a series of engagement roadshow events over the last year into Notebook LM and look for key points about data-related issues that might not have otherwise have surfaced into the data strategy process. This use of LLMs to make more of existing engagement, rather than to analyse new outreach, has felt useful to expore.
Participation & Procurement
I’ve been working this week on organising a couple of upcoming events that build on our collaboration with ParticipationAI on principles for public participation in AI procurement:
- Attending the OGP Open Algorithms Network - 16th September
- Hosting a Workshop on the Principles for AI Procurement & Public Participation on the 17th September in Washington DC (I’ll be in Washington 15th - 17th, and Bay area 18th - 20th if anyone there wants to catch up!)
- Co-organising a fringe event on Open Government, AI Procurement & Public Participation to take place alongside the Open Government Partnership summit
As part of that, I’ve also been working on revised text for the principles - which have been strengthened by lots of great feedback from a workshop in July, and comments on the document.
Other bits and pieces
- We’ve had a reply to the Open Letter to the UK Government on Prioritising AI Literacy for All Citizens - which I’ll share more updates on next week.
- We’re getting set for PAIRS 2026 with plans for in-person events on 18th Feb, and virtual/hybrid sessions just before. Hopefully the CfP will be out soon!