We would like to draw your attention to the Crafting Participatory Tech Futures Online Workshops which will be taking place on 20 and 23 July.
20 July, online (08:30-10:30 UTC): https://luma.com/1aa12iaw
23 July, online (16:30-18:30 UTC): https://luma.com/f30v8m09
These are interactive, online workshops led by the Responsible Artificial Intelligence Network (RAIN), and invite civil society, academia and non-profits to affirm imagination as a collective practice.
What if AI futures were not something delivered to us, but something we could deliberate, contest, and build together? What if diverse publics could gather to imagine technological futures grounded in real societal and ecological needs, and chart practical pathways toward them?
The workshops invite participants to affirm imagination as a collective practice. Through participatory world-building, we will move beyond abstract optimism or dystopian critique, and instead co-define actionable, justice-oriented AI futures.
Discovery: Discover futures thinking as a critical practice that examines how imagined futures shape present decisions, power structures, and technological trajectories.
Encounters: Through dialogue and reflection, collaboratively articulate future scenarios that feel socially, environmentally, and politically meaningful. Rather than tightly scripted facilitation, this phase encourages emergent conversation, prioritizing story-telling over theory.
Crafting: Tell new stories and potential journeys that link the diverse futures that you imagined together.
Workshop participants will be invited to contribute to a report with learnings from this workshop and its other three iterations.
The workshop is run as a collaboration between the Responsible Artificial Intelligence Network (RAIN.ngo) and Our AI Collective. It is the third of a series that began at the Fairness, Accountability and Transparency (FAccT) conference, and London Data Week.