Friday afternoon. An hours train journey. And nothing pressing on my ToDo list. Perhaps an opportunity to finally finish some weeknotes!
What I’ve been up to
Looking back on PAIRS
PAIRS - the Participatory AI Research and Practice Symposium in in Feb was really fantastic. As Octavia Field Reid put it, our symposium day in Delhi was real soul food - and it’s continued to be so encouraging to see all the LinkedIn posts and blog posts continuing to come out reflecting both on the substance of the content, and the space created for people. I feel so grateful to be able to work in a context that calls out the best of our shared capacity for combining rigorous work with a nurturing and caring approach. It has meant a lot to see how much the caring vibe of PAIRS has resonated with people.
- On Tuesday morning I published the latest PAIRS Newletter including our Chairs Report and links to recordings and highlights.
- I’ve been updating the website with recordings from the online day (all edited by Emily), and editing and uploading recordings from our India sessions this week.
For the India recordings we’ve got a mix of formats, including backup Zoom screencast recordings (the camera crew only arrived mid-morning) and webcam footage, and professionally recorded speaker videos, but without the slides in shot. I’ve been having to use a mix of methods to make sure videos sync slides and videos. The best case turns out to be when our professional recording and zoom recordings overlap (just two timed videos to sync!) and so I really wish I’d left the zoom/screencast recording going all day, rather than stopping after the camera operators arrived! Learning for next time.
This week (and over the last few weeks) I’ve had some lovely calls as well with people who either attended PAIRS, or have since learned about it, and are interested in how they can get involved in the community. Particular thanks to Franziska Heuschkel who put together some fantastic user-journey feedback on what it was like to engage with PAIRS.
I was particularly happy to see this piece in the Indian Press, by PAIRS presenter Ashwin Upreti, and Member of Parliament, Sasmit Patra, titled Society bears AI risks. It must have a say in AI governance, as ripples of our discussions on participatory AI in India continue to surface. Over last weekend it was also great to see submissions go into the AI for Good building on collaboration between PAIRS presenters.
Looking ahead to the Global Dialogue
A lot of my week has been taken up looking ahead to the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva in July, and working on the design of a kick-off meeting for the Citizens Track on AI project.
Thanks to Susan Oman sharing her speaking slot, I was able to talk about this work briefly in the Informal Stakeholder Consultation on the Global Dialogue on Artificial Intelligence Governance on Wednesday - and it was great to hear a number of the contributors talking about the importance of citizen voice.
I’ve also had some helpful responses to my blog post on Expanding the Visibility of Public Voice on AI - What if? and looking forward to picking up conversations on what an Expo presence for citizen voice at AI for Good could look like with a few people next week.
CoCoDa - Research Data Access
Today I was down in London for a workshop hosted by The Open Data Institute and the Data Transfer Initiative focussed on the CoCoDa project that is exploring how researchers can study online platforms “Moving beyond computational methods without (legal) teeth, and legal solutions that are not implementable.”. It was refreshing (for much of the day at least) to get back to a focus on data governance, rather than AI, and to explore one of the core challenges that gave rise to Connected by Data: the necessity, and inadequacy, of individual data rights as a means of governing data for the public good.
There were lots of resonances with the issues we explored with MyData Global, Datasphere Initiative and Aapti Institute in In this together: Combining individual and collective strategies to confront data power - and the point that collective governance is an important complement to individual consent in identifying legitimate uses of data landed well. However, the event also raised some critical questions for me on the distinction between research that seeks data from private platforms:
- For ‘social signals’ - to inform general social science research;
- For safety / platform impacts research - that uses data to support governance of the platforms the data comes from.
These may need quite different strategies, and techo-legal approaches - yet the debate appeared to move between them quite fluidly.
Green Tech & Talk
I was formally elected as co-convenor of the Science and Technology Policy Working Group for Green Party of England and Wales at our brief AGM on Tuesday. There is lots of energy and expertise pouring into the Green Party right now - and it’s raising some fascinating (and good to have!) challenges around managing passionate debate on the impacts of tech and AI in particular.
Over the coming weeks I’m hoping to get some headspace to think about how we might apply principles of public deliberation and dialogue to some of our member-led policy discussions.
What I’ve been reading
In Monday’s workshop on a Citizens Track on AI Governance, one of the opening inputs will be presented by Iñaki Goñi, so it was serendipitous that my LinkedIn feed served up a link to Iñaki’s latest paper: Design principles of dialogue about science and technology and the design frictions they reveal: Towards a demo-technical analysis. It’s a fantastic timely account of the design tensions in public dialogue on technology, and well worth a read of the whole paper, although Iñaki also offers a wonderfully actionable synthesis of the main analysis in ten questions for the dialogue designer to grapple with (along with a call for more transparency and reflexivity in answering them…):
- Locality: How can dialogue methods be adapted to mobilise local priorities while accommodating stakeholder tensions and power differences?
- Intra-community difference: How can design engage with participants before dialogue to inform decisions based on their identities and framings of the issue?
- Multi-level embedding: How can dialogue bridge different governance levels and create connections between local, regional, and national decision-making?
- Methodological standardisation: How can standardised approaches ensure consistency while allowing for flexibility and contextual adaptation?
- Personal connection: How can dialogue create a personal connection between participants and the issues at hand, using, for instance, first-hand experiences or artistic engagement?
- Open futures: How can dialogue open up imaginative possibilities for socio-technical futures rather than reinforcing existing assumptions?
- Meta-dialogical: How can dialogue make itself an object of discussion, encouraging participants to reflect on and critique its own design?
- Powerful citizens: How can dialogue help participants recognise and leverage their political power beyond the dialogical space?
- Opened-up technoscience framing: How can dialogue surface and explore ideological conflicts in technoscience rather than closing down contestation?
- Structured expertise: How can dialogue reshape who counts as an expert and redefine how expertise is engaged with and challenged?
From Goñi (2026) Design principles of dialogue about science and technology and the design frictions they reveal: Towards a demo-technical analysis. Design Studies, Volume 104, 2026.
What I need to pay attention to
Next week is my last week working before two weeks of leave, so I’m keen to keep plans moving for the Citizens Track on AI - as well as to follow up on fundraising activities.
Signatures have now closed on the updated Open Letter on Critical AI Literacy and so I’ve agreed to send that off early next week.
I also need to follow up planning for our webinar on Student Voice on AI in Education on April 22nd, and preparation for a panel on Workers Rights, Green Politics and Technology at the 2026 Hawkwood May Day Festival
Lastly, I’ve got some practical work to do for my local non-CbD projects with Common Good Gloucestershire, and supporting thinking about data infrastructure with Fund Gloucestershire (which I learnt last week was named by the master of ‘Giving Things Names that Describe What They Do’ of ‘TheyWorkForYou’ and ‘FixMyStreet’ fame…).