Community engagement and participation activity update

Action points

Scotland’s AI Strategy committed to two key actions to ensure civil society’s full participation in the work of the Scottish AI Alliance in the delivery of the strategy.

• Action 1.1 We will establish the Scottish AI Alliance including board members and start building an effective mechanism to ensure civil society’s full participation.

• Action 1.7 Establish a community engagement and participation strategy to encourage non- tech businesses and the people of Scotland to adopt and engage with AI

Here is a summary of our related activity so far.

Civil Society Workshops

Our activity around this kicked off on 5 July 2021 when we convened a workshop with various civil society organisations to kick start the conversation about the best way to engage. A report from the workshop can be viewed here.

Since the workshop, we have gone through several iterations of thinking about how we engage civil society and especially under-represented and marginalised groups in society with the activities of the AI Alliance and AI in general in Scotland.  We are currently thinking of all engagement activity as two workstreams – outward and inward, visualised in the figure below.

Community Participatory Mechanisms

However, before we proceed further, we issued an open tender for a best practice review of community participatory mechanisms for government strategy delivery. Findings will be due end of January 2022.

Our rationale for this review is to find out and learn from others what has worked, and perhaps what hasn’t worked so that it can inform the development of our own mechanism. We will publish the findings when the review is complete and our next step then is to pull together a brief to commission a collaborative task force through an open tender to help us develop a community engagement and participatory mechanism for the Scottish AI Alliance and its delivery of Scotland’s AI Strategy.

As you will see in our diagram, we do not expect the mechanism to involve one method of engagement, we anticipate that we will have multiple routes of engagement to ensure maximum participation.

This work also ties in with the wider work of the Scottish AI Alliance to date:

• We carried out a series of user requirement gathering workshops for our Scottish AI Playbook and there were overlapping themes from these engagements and the output from the initial workshop on 5 July.

• We recently responded to a YouGov poll which showed that only 1 in 5 people in Scotland trusted the way AI is being used and developed.

• We are in the accelerator phase of a CivTech challenge around trust and agency in public sector use of algorithms especially in relation to children and families. You can listen to a podcast about that project (link to.

• We are in the initiation stages of developing a public engagement online course

• We are also committed to a programme of work around engaging children with AI and with the work of the Alliance.

All of the activity above is connected and we hope it gives a flavour of what we have been doing since the workshop in July 2021.