Abstract Summary
Introduction: In a context of rapid international urban digitization, local governments increasingly turn to AI and algorithms to tackle urban challenges and facilitate decision making on urban services. With this comes an increasingly complex web of stakeholders, data flows, and legal frameworks shaping the landscape of urban governance. How can citizens navigate this complexity to play in shaping the AI driven future of their city? Furthermore, how can urban decision makers ensure that their adoption of AI aligns with the values and needs of diverse communities? These questions lie at the intersection of citizen participation and AI governance, which have both been policy priorities for the municipality of Amsterdam since 2020. Purpose: The purpose of this workshop is to investigate how urban actors can involve citizens in the design, adoption, and use of AI in the city. More specifically, it will use Amsterdam as an example to explore how a municipal organization can establish processes and partnerships to institutionalize citizen participation on AI. This fits within the conference’s sub themes of digitization, diversity, and inclusion, as it focuses on giving all citizens agency to shape the role of AI in the future of their city. Content : The session will include the following: 1) Presentation and discussion of citizen and civil servant perspectives on participation on AI, drawn from a research study conducted in partnership with Digital Rights House and the Municipality of Amsterdam from February – June 2023. The study included an experimentation phase aimed at investigating how to best engage with citizens on the topic of the municipal adoption and use of algorithms. 2) Introducing a knowledge base being developed at the Municipality of Amsterdam to provide end to end guidance on organizing citizen participation regarding AI. Covering goal identification, citizen outreach, participation method design, stakeholder mapping, and follow up procedures, this knowledge base offers a roadmap for cities seeking to involve their citizens in AI decision making. 3) Participants engage in a hands on collaborative exercise to design a citizen participation process based on a real world problem. The exercise aims tofosters dialogue, idea exchange, and the creation of actionable strategies for implementing citizen participation in AI initiatives. Learning outcomes: Participants should leave with increased knowledge of citizen needs when it comes to participation on AI, as well as concrete approaches rooted in real life examples that can be used to organize participation on AI. Target audience: The workshop is relevant to anyone involved in the design and implementation of AI in the urban context, as well as any society actor representing citizen interests in the field of technology and society. This includes civil servants, technology developers, community organizations, etc. Resources: The aforementioned report can be found
