Reading
Publications from the field of Civic AI, Participatory AI, and governing infrastructural AI. Essays and Field notes explore ideas and practices out in the open, alongside presentations.
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Tracking the field Listening to an emergent field: live searches of the research literature for participatory AI, civic AI and AI sovereignty.
Publications shared from across the field.
A core reference for the Civic AI methodology. Sieber and colleagues ask what civic participation in AI actually means, and note that AI's opacity, mutability and resource requirements impede meaningful engagement, particularly in cities. They distinguish institutional transparency, functional empowerment and democratic empowerment.
journals.sagepub.com DOI 10.1177/23998083241296200
Liverpool built the world's first civic data cooperative on the back of its public health history. In this piece, Buchan argues for a civic path to AI that serves lives, livelihoods and life chances. Buchan's connected city architecture models civic AI governance and stewardship at the level of the city precinct and is an inspiration for civic interplay.
news.liverpool.ac.uk
A first-of-its-kind charter for responsible data sharing across a city region, which is what it looks like when civic AI stops being a framing and becomes a document people sign.
news.liverpool.ac.uk
Wonderful work by the Digital Statecraft Academy. “This is not just digital transformation. It is a fundamental reimagining of governance itself—how it works, who it serves, and how it sustains public trust in a world increasingly shaped by algorithms.”
digitalstatecraft.academy
The Ada Lovelace Institute asked commercial AI labs what public participation they actually do. The answer: belief in it, no consistent methods, and obstacles that are structural rather than technical, being resourcing, siloes, misaligned incentives and commercial sensitivity. Useful for anyone who assumes participation fails for lack of good intentions.
adalovelaceinstitute.org
The ongoing programme rather than the single report. It works on what the public actually thinks about AI and on the methods for getting those voices into decisions. Crucial because participation is the part everyone endorses and nobody specifies.
adalovelaceinstitute.org
A working precedent that shows how a decentralised community can contribute to data governance processes in productive ways.
freiheit.org
Seven signals from GovLab forecasting studios. The open data paradigm is under strain, ecosystems are becoming machine-centric, and data infrastructure is getting harder to sustain. Anticipatory AI governance is core to the civic interplay imaginary.
arxiv.org DOI 10.48550/arXiv.2607.27029
Bria is advancing the EuroStack initiative, building on data sovereignty efforts to reclaim European digital sovereignty, now in an era of AI.
ucl.ac.uk
The programme that commissioned EuroStack, establishing algorithms for the common good. Seeking partnerships for global AI governance.
bertelsmann-stiftung.de
The European Commission's own science service doing digital sovereignty as a research programme. Run out of the JRC's Digital and Data Sovereignty Unit in Ispra, it feeds the European Data Union Strategy and is standing up a Data Sharing and Digital Sovereignty Innovation Lab that uses regulatory sandboxing to test governance before it is legislated. Where EuroStack makes the argument from outside, this is the institution building the evidence from within.
joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu
Bridle cautions against treating human intelligence as the only kind worth designing AI systems for. Bridle argues that "human-centred design" is a legacy model in a more-than-human world facing ecological collapse.
jamesbridle.com
Near the end of his life Lovelock imagined AI as essential to Earth's self-regulation, with humans as enablers of a more intelligent life form. Lovelock's vision avoids the political economy of hyperscale AI, but it does bring a hopeful imagination to human-AI collaboration as a kind of hospicing of modernity, to another form of intelligence that may well outlive humanity. It helps set the frame: What kind of civic practices are agents trained in?
en.wikipedia.org
The Ada Lovelace Institute introduced a framework for participatory data stewardship. This framework from 2021 states that it "rejects practices of data collection, storage, sharing and use in ways that are opaque or seek to manipulate people, in favour of practices that empower people to help inform, shape and – in some instances – govern their own data." The work is an early attempt to combine data stewardship with participatory AI practices by the Institute.
adalovelaceinstitute.org
Exploratory thinking and experience in longer form, narrative prose.
If planetary institutions govern the digital world, what is the politics of planetary democracy? On imagination as practice, micro-political acts, and seeking spaces of civil repair.
What's the material intensity of your digital footprint? This experimental calculator creates a material footprint of a gen-AI conversation.
Somehow, in the not too distant past, who we are as citizens changed. Our allegiances shifted, our field of vision changed. Our everyday sensory realities morphed. Somehow, we became citizens of a…
Many of us spend huge amounts of time online and connected, but are worried about the negative impacts of digital technology - on the planet, on our mental health, on our politics, maybe in our communities.These are important things to worry about. But we also need to try to make better.
Learning (again) from Ursula LeGuin The late science fiction writer Ursula LeGuin, in her infinite wisdom, shared a definition of technology that resonates here deeply. Technology, she said, is the…
Civic Interplay is a space for reflection on a basic question: What does it mean to *become-citizen* in an era of (so-called) sovereign AI? Because the times have become strange - *agentic, even* - the nature of enquiry need not be without philosophy, or play…
Einstein's afterlives continue to morph and change. How do we protect what we love most about this creative misfit?
A refreshed newsletter focus for 2025, and an actual-imaginary encounter with Walter Benjamin to guide a mystical love of language & storytelling.
Is the data-rich city taking on a life of its own? And can Hugh Stretton’s Ideas for Australian Cities help us navigate its hazards? Originally published in 2019.
Recent appearances at conferences and events.
An introduction to Civic Interplay: the proposition, practices of civic AI today, and the projects. Slides, October 2026.
Whose sovereignty, settled where? How civic interplay works as a practice of knowing, saying and asking, with the data centre build-out as its case. Slides, paper version.
Slides from the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, April 2026.
Conference paper, 2026. Open access on Zenodo.
doi.org
Thoughts or reflections in motion. Note: may contain poetry, or AI slop, or test ideas.
Eight things a community could ask for when a data centre arrives, from reserved capacity up to co-ownership. Each rung names a mechanism that already exists somewhere.
Six layers of the Australian AI stack, and who holds each one. Australia holds the ground of a stack it does not hold.
Fighting the US Government through AI civics: Allowing space for Dario Amodei to define AI civics
Paying attention to what is being said, as the models are being trained, and the governance apparatus is laid out.
The agentic era may be getting very weird. Oh wait it already was. Reflections during the week of Pope Leo's Encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas.
Irina was there to hug people on arrival. Many had not yet met. Some had cycled here from nearby, others had left their bicycles at home, flown by aircraft, walked, caught the train across Europe.
Live searches for the vocabulary of civic AI across the research literature: a dated snapshot of how the field is talking.