Project Spotlight: On and Off Responsibilities in Governing AI
A new four-week seminar series
Welcome to the third edition of the Metagov Project Features newsletter.
We are excited to announce and feature our upcoming Metagov seminar series: On and Off Responsibilities in Governing AI.
This is a four-week series running from January 31st through February 21st, 2024, with seminars taking place on Wednesdays from 12-1pm Eastern Time.
The series will be led by Metagov community participant, Harvard Fellow, and Responsible AI Institute Research Scientist, Manon Revel, and is conducted in collaboration with the Responsible AI Institute.
🌐 Ready to join right away?
Registration for all four seminars is now open and accessible through our Luma. Click the image above or button bellow to register.
Background
Since the founding of Metagov, we have hosted over a hundred seminars featuring research and projects from our community and guests. Seminars explore a diverse range of topics in online and digital governance. The seminars have long been a cornerstone of the organization, serving as a regular Schelling point for the community to gather and exchange ideas, a venue for the general public to be introduced to contemporary research in online governance, and a means of exercising collective self-governance with seminars proposed and voted on by the community using PolicyKit.
Over time, we’ve seen an increase in the number of people in our community proposing seminars, as well as increases in capacity as more people from the community contribute to the seminar by becoming a seminar facilitator. These increases in capacity and the gradual decentralization of the seminar’s maintenance and operation has cultivated a more defined sense of community ownership over the seminar program.
Reflections and Development
In 2023 we reserved a handful of seminars for the community to reflect on the past and future of the seminar. During those discussions, we thought about the ways the seminar had served us well so far, and what ways we might like to see the seminar progress in 2024.
In general, reflections tended to focus on ways of approaching the seminar that could increase shared knowledge exchange and community collaboration. In particular we discussed:
Duration and Depth: The way the seminar was structured tended to optimize for topic variability. On the one hand, having a high degree of variability is aligned with Metagov’s interest in decentralization, and also presents more opportunities for our research and community to connect with new audiences. On the other hand, constantly high variety can sometimes make it harder for a community to develop shared connections and ways of sense-making together. By returning to the same topic over an extended period of time, diverse ways of thinking about that topic are able to find common ground with each other, resulting in the development of more integrated and cohesive forms of collective intelligence. Noticing this organizational tendency, proposals began to emerge to balance the stream constant variety with an occasionally longer stretch of seminars focused on a specific topic.
Collaboration and Co-production: Proposals to experiment with topics spanning multiple seminars were also complimented by voices from the community excited by the potential to engage in more community collaboration and co-production. By making more space for a given topic to unfold, a more multi-modal model of the seminar started to emerge, one where theory and practice could come into productive dialogue with each other. For example, one week might feature a lecture and discussion, while the next could feature an experimental governance workshop followed by collective writing and debriefing exercises.
In addition to these reflections on format, we also discussed ideas for topical framings. We came up with thirteen potential framings and posed them to the community as an approval voting poll. Here are the results of the poll, ranked from most to least votes.
Online <> Offline Governance: How might online governance integrate more closely with in person interactions? (+15)
Alternative Infrastructures: What alternative infrastructures exist for online governance, and how do they affect how we govern ourselves? (+13)
Data Governance and Solidarity: What models and practices exist for collectively governing our data? (+13)
Practical Governance & Communication: How do we communicate the practical applications and impact of online governance to friends who are not very online? (+12)
Comparative Governance: How do different cultures and communities relate to and implement rules and governance across history, place (digital and physical), and scale? (+9)
Automated Governance: What role does automated decision making and agents play in governance? (+9)
Psychology & Governance: How do mental models of governance intersect with individual behavior? How are these complementary or at odds? (+8)
Challenging Assumptions: What do we hold true, and how can we change our perspective? (+7)
Internet Governance Layer: What does it mean to build a governance layer for the internet? (+6)
Politics & Governance: Where do governance and politics intersect? (+6)
Governance Study & Research: How can we expand our understanding of governance “research” and "study" through engagements with various fields of study like black studies, digital humanities, music studies, performance studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, and more? (+6)
Internet Governance & Climate: How do internet governance and aspects of climate and ecological study inform the way we think about the future and sustainability of governance more broadly? (+5)
Governance Transitions: What are people’s first-hand accounts of online governance transitions? (+5)
Series Overview and Registration
On and Off Responsibilities in Governing AI is our first attempt at organizing a seminar series that reflects the expressed interests of the community both in terms of form and framing.
In terms of framing, the series aims to bring into conversation an interplay between perspectives on governance methods, models, and innovations initially developed to respond to the particularities of governing online and offline resources and structures. In particular, we are using this interplay to consider contemporary developments in AI governance and how different perspectives on governance can productively come together to shape our sense of responsibility to these developments. This framing is also, in part, where the title of the series draws its name from.
To give a sense for the formal implementation, the following week-by-week, high-level overview of the series is instructive. We have attempted to combine a set of interactive, co-productive, and experiential activities with theoretical explorations and expert presentations in a way that dynamically brings us closer to a shared perspective on the series topic. For convenience, a registration link for each seminar is included after each week’s description:
Week 1: participants meet each other, make introductions, and collectively establish individual and common intentions/alignment. Registration Link
Week 2: participants take part in an interactive governance experiment designed to surface a collective imaginary for how we might approach the governance of AI. Registration Link
Week 3: Var Shankar, Executive Director of the Responsible AI Institute, joins us to give a guest lecture on approaches to responsibly governing AI. Registration Link
Week 4: volunteer participants present lightning talks that take a thread of discussion from the previous three weeks and elaborate it to offer one future direction that they could imagine this conversation continuing. We conclude with group co-writing and discussion reflecting on the series as a whole. Registration Link
Connecting With Us
We’re excited to run this experiment, and want to take this opportunity to invite you to join us for not only the series, but to also join us in our community on the Metagov Slack where we will have async discussions on this and other topics related to online and digital governance.
Joining is easy.
All you need to do is complete a short community survey, and you will be sent an invitation to the Slack along with an welcome email orienting you to the community.
We look forward to meeting you and seeing where this conversation leads us.
-Cent