A New Home for Crafting Participatory Tech Futures

Thank you! To the 110+ people who signed up to our newsletter 🗞️, the 70+ people who joined our workshops, my eight fellow co-facilitators ⭐️, the two major events that hosted us 🎉, and the wonderful partnering organisations 🏆 who made this work possible over the past month!

🎉 Beginning at ACM FAccT on 25th June, moving to London Data Week on 8th July, and working online this past week, we have run four iterations of the #CraftingParticipatoryTechFutures workshop.

The workshops have been fascinating, with each group of participants bringing new and very different ideas, from 🙅 information that should not be treated computationally, to the establishment of 🏝️ sandboxes for testing tech policies, to the creation of 🫚 mycelium-like knowledge exchange systems!

The workshops were designed between February and March, and the four iterations have given us a great deal of insight as to what works well and what needs improving. But we have certainly found that there is demand for workshops that, as we'd set out, privilege:

🦄 Story-telling over scripts,
💫 Holistic understandings over binaries, and
🦻 Embodied knowledge over computationalist notions of cognition.

In the coming weeks, we will begin working towards a post-workshops report, reflecting on the insights gathered, and the value of harnessing collective imagination for bringing about better tech futures. We will build this collaboratively, adequately acknowledging each contributor.

In the meantime, this is the new space for news from the Responsible Artificial Intelligence Network (RAIN), invitations to collaborate on the #CraftingParticipatoryTechFutures initiative, and (if you sign up via https://raifutures.com to Ismael writes) reflections from your truly, Ismael K.G.