About
About Civic Interplay
Civic Interplay explores how digital and AI methods can support grounded, place-based civic enquiry, towards more care-full and resilient futures.
In the context of AI services, it recognises that governing digital infrastructure well, under democratic conditions, depends upon greater legibility and accountability between digital systems and place-based communities.
What forms of civic enquiry are possible in an era of AI infrastructure?
Open experimentation
This is a methodology that is in development, which means that experimentation is deliberately open. Not everything will be successful; perhaps some tools and ideas will be mistakes. The purpose behind this is to build a greater sense of agency among those who may feel excluded from decisions about how value is being captured and shared within their communities.
While transparency is never an end in itself, the methods here seek to bring attention to the important role that everyday digital capabilities play in shaping civic agency, towards more effective governance.
On the use of AI
Agents and AI workflows are key to the civic interplay method. Agentic workflows are tested and trialled, in order to read and interrogate information records that are publicly available. This includes open government data and other information that is available via the public web. By diving in, these methods also establish practices of critical enquiry and sense-checking around the adoption of agents as effective co-enquirers. This practice also experimentally seeks to understand where the new forms of ‘data enclosure’ exist or are emerging, in the way that previous platform ecosystems built the moats around their intelligence.
AI is not supported as a writing tool, wherever possible.
Working with Civic Interplay
- Public administrations
- Read your own plans and priorities against what has been funded, approved and recorded since. The method and the space are open to you; your team runs it. Ask about a reading
- Community
- Records you can check, and tools for asking your own questions of your place. Explore the Data Centres Transparency Project
- Elected representatives
- See the investment and approvals in your area, and what the record shows happened next. Read the Senate submission
- Researchers and educators
- The method is open and citable, with datasets on Zenodo. Records and method on Zenodo
Who’s behind it
Civic Interplay is being explored by Dr Sarah Barns and collaborators, through a Vice-Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellowship at RMIT University’s Centre for Urban Research.
Civic Interplay is a friendly space. Current partners and collaborators include Professor Annette Markham and the wider Futures + Literacies + Methods Lab at Utrecht University, Irina Panovich (aiio studio), story-weaver Amber Theurer (HUMAN AF) and digital geographer Miguel McCormick (Facta Living Lab, Mexico). If you’d like to join this friendly endeavour, get in touch.