If you’re a people person, enjoy organizing, want to get your community involved, or prefer talking ideas through with others or working in a group, use this Local Facilitation Guide to host a micro-consultation! This can be done at your home, school, workplace, public library, studio, or wherever else you gather with people. Bring together your friends, family, students, coworkers, teammates, bandmates, or classmates. Work through this Guide together, supported by the Readings & Multimedia List and Examples List of “AI” Technologies, and designate someone to take notes as you discuss. At the end, decide as a group what your answers are to questions of your choice in the Submission Template and complete it together for sending into the consultation.
While we designed this local facilitation guide to support hosting a smaller informal group, those who are comfortable with event coordination or organizing should feel free to scale up and host a larger or more public workshop or event. Activities may be modified for a higher number of people by, for example, doing things in breakout groups and report-backs rather than in one group with everyone.
NOTE: Submissions will be posted publicly, so please only share details you are comfortable being posted. Keep this in mind if sharing stories or experiences that are not your own, and do not share identifying details about someone without their consent.
Preparation
Participants: 3-8 people (recommended, but feel free to invite as many people as you’re comfortable organizing)
Time: 2 hours (Times are suggestions only, and may vary based on total number of participants. Feel free to take as much or as little time as seems right, and to adjust as the group moves through the activities.)
Recommended Materials:
- Markers and Pens
- Sticky Notes
- Notepads
- Place to put sticky notes (a table or wall is fine, but you can also use a whiteboard or blackboard)
Pre-Reading and Organizing:
- Go through the list of bullet points in the Open Letter or the Examples List of “AI” for examples of AI in the news. Select 1-3 per person to discuss as part of Activity #2.
- Think through and prepare some examples of your experiences with any of the many things currently called “AI”.
- Designate one or more notetakers for each part of the three activities. They will be responsible for taking notes to feed into the eventual group submission to the consultation.
- For more in-depth learning, you may select something from the Readings & Multimedia List to work through together in the days or weeks leading up to the day of your gathering.
The goal of this micro-consultation is to discuss issues as a group and work together to come to consensus about possible futures involving AI. You will use that to develop and draft a letter or collective submission to this consultation.
Activity #1: AI Experiences (30 minutes)
Goal: This activity acts as an icebreaker while encouraging participants to draw out and share their own understanding of, and beliefs about, AI with each other. Participants will share and explore their personal experiences using, encountering, or being affected by AI and its impacts in their lives and communities. The eventual goal is to come to a rough consensus for completing a submission together for the consultation.
Process: Depending on the size of the group and time available, you may go around in a circle as a group (each person shares their answers with the whole group), or break into pairs for this activity (partners “interview” each other). The questions are:
- What is your name (if everyone does not already know each other) and one thing you find inspiring?
- What are you hoping to get out of today’s event?
- What are 1-3 ways you’ve used, encountered, or been impacted by AI in your own life or in your community?
- How do you feel about your experiences with AI in general?
- Do you think something should be done about AI, or a specific type or use case of AI? What should be done, and who should do it?
If done in pairs, after each partner interviews the other, each interviewer shares their partner’s responses to the group. After everyone has shared, whether in pairs or directly to the group, the host/facilitator should open up a general discussion and invite responses to what people shared. The designated notetaker should be taking notes throughout the sharing and open floor discussion.
Activity #2: Imagining Alternate Futures (60 minutes)
Goal: Explore different futures involving varying types and degrees of AI implementation, that participants might want to encourage or oppose. Participants are responsible for imagining what their respective futures, and their community’s and society’s future, might look like under different circumstances involving AI, by extrapolating from present-day news headlines.
Process: Participants will reflect on news headlines and instances of community responses to “AI” or other forms of exploitative technologies, and critically interrogate the values that may guide different futures.
Step 1. Collecting Stories and Inspiration (10 minutes)
- a. Participants each select 1-2 stories from within the Inspiration Collection, and 1-2 stories from the Open Letter or Examples List of “AI”. Remember stories do not all need to be about actual use of AI—perhaps a story is about what happens in the absence of AI, or rolling back of an AI tool or product.
- b. Everyone writes down their chosen stories on sticky notes, one story per note.
Step 2. Values Mapping (30 minutes)
In this step, participants will create a messy map of probable futures based on the stories chosen in Step 1.
- a. Go around the group and have each participant share all of their selected stories/examples, and what values they think are demonstrated in each story, or moved away from or towards. You may choose to have each person share all their stories at once, or have each person share only one story at a time, continuing around the group multiple times until everyone has shared all their stories.
- b. Write the values demonstrated in each story on the sticky note for that story (or an attached new sticky note if there isn’t space.)
- c. After a story is shared, the person who shared it posts the stories and values sticky note on a table, wall, board, or other available surface (that has enough space to fit everyone’s sticky notes by the end). Do not worry about organizing or sorting them at this point.
Step 3. Alternate Futures (20 minutes)
The goal of Step 3 is to divide stories into two or more potential futures, broadly along the lines of a desirable future and an undesirable future. Some stories might be in the middle or not quite fit and that’s fine. You may also choose to divide stories by the values discussed in Step 2, rather than necessarily “good” or “bad” alone.
The designated notetaker should be taking notes throughout all the discussions, debates, and decisions that occur as you work through the steps below.
- a. As a group, go through each sticky note and decide which “future” it would most contribute to. Designate different sections of the wall / table / board for each possible future, and move each sticky note to the right place once the group decides.
- b. Try to come to consensus about whether each story is a signal for a desirable future or an undesirable future, and why. Participants are encouraged to debate and make their case if there is disagreement on any sticky note or where it goes.
- c. After all sticky notes have been sorted, decide as a group how you would describe each of the resulting futures in a paragraph, and what its dominant themes and values are.
Activity #3: Bringing It All Together (30 minutes)
Goal: Draft a letter or group submission for the People’s Consultation on AI based on the discussions and learning from Activities #1 and #2.
Process: Refer to the Submission Template, which you can download and type directly into for your submission, or just use as a reference guide while writing up a separate or simpler letter. Go through the questions in the Submission Template and choose which ones you’re comfortable answering as a group, based on the earlier Activities. Draft responses to each question together, or divide up the work and assign different questions or sections to different people, pairs, or groups of people to be responsible for drafting.
Once everyone is done drafting their section, report back to each other, sharing and reading over each other’s sections and providing feedback. Input the feedback, and designate a key writer or key editor to finalize the letter or submission. This may not be done in one day, so feel free to set a deadline for each other or schedule regrouping for a few days later or the following week.
Closing: Send In Your Comments!
Once your group is satisfied with the contents of your letter or submission, edit, proofread, format, and finalize it. Decide how you will describe yourselves for sending it in (whether using your names or describing what brings you together as a group, e.g., a school club or university course, a sports team, shared hobby, family, or simply concerned residents of a specific community). Then save and submit the file here.