Some mid-week weeknotes…
MozFest: Data, Deliberation and more
I’m writing this from the train down to Barcelona for Mozilla Festival. It’s the first time I’ll have made it to a MozFest in person: and I’ve been triple-booking my schedule with interesting sessions to get to. Billed as “The premier gathering for people working to build a better digital world.”, the agenda is packed with fab looking sessions on new approaches to data and AI governance.
The main thing I’m hoping to get some inputs into whilst there is an exciting project with ISWE Foundation to try and make some of the ideas from our joint [options paper on global deliberation on AI]](https://connectedbydata.org/projects/2024-gca-ai), and my recent op-ed with Anna Colom, a reality. I’m doing a few days a month to support ISWE on project design and fundraising to set out how a citizens track could work for the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance. Do reach out if you’d like to chat more about this!
I’m also looking forward to catching up with the Participation AI team to explore next steps for the Principles for Public Participation in the Procurement of AI.
AI in Education - Workshop in a Box
On Monday we launched ‘AI in Education: Have your say’ - a ‘workshop in a box’ to support distributed dialogues in schools and colleges around the use of generative AI for teaching and learning - with a set of feedback activities designed to feed into a Summit on AI in Education the Department for Education are organising early next year.
Jeni has written more about it over on BlueSky here. The genesis of this project is both in the EdTech design lab we ran back in 2023/24, and in the design lab workshop we held just before the summer on Supporting Collective School Decision Making on AI and Education Technology . I’ve captured a few notes on the resource design process here.
It’s been quite a time-pressured process to pull the resource together (we only confirmed the work at the start of October, and the Summit feedback needs to be for is early next year), but it’s also felt good to be able to build on many of the foundations’ we’ve laid in recent years. Plus, I rather enjoyed the diversion of building out a registration and feedback system with AirTable automations, and a bit of EduBase data-wrangling.
We’ve already got 20+ schools signed-up to hopefully deliver the workshop, and so next on my agenda for this project is working on the tooling to analyse responses. Aware that, if we get a high volume of responses, we might want to consider turning to responsible use of some AI tools to support e.g. handwriting transcription for search-ability, we worked carefully through the data protection and intellectual property issues that might arise - and have tried to come up with both a data minimisation approach and project privacy policy that reflect our values. However, this remains an ongoing part of the work.
PAIRS
Last Friday was the submission deadline for PAIRS 2026. I sat down at 4pm to start reviewing abstracts in so far, and just as I did, they started coming in thick and fast. We received a fantastic 133 submissions in all. After we take out those that were incomplete, or were focussed on technical AI research (e.g. machine learning techniques) rather than participatory AI, we’ve sent 114 abstracts out to the Programme Committee for review.
I’ve been really impressed with HotCRP so far as our submission and review platform. I had reviews all assigned within an hour - instead of the day of spreadsheet and script-wrangling last year with our home-grown Google Docs solution.
Now the focus switches to really thinking about curation of the three events that will make up PAIRS - and working out how to engage with official summit events.
More updates soon.
What I’ve been reading
Mostly I’m reading & reviewing abstracts! But I did have chance today to catch-up on Maas and Inglés’ great paper on ‘Beyond Participatory AI’ published last year which calls for participatory AI practice to have a much clearer analysis of political economy and power asymmetries between AI developers and other stakeholders. Well worth a read.