CivTech 10 launches challenge to enhance public participation in decision-making
Image by Jamillah Knowles & Reset.Tech Australia / © https://au.reset.tech/ / Better Images of AI / Detail from Connected People / CC-BY 4.0
The Scottish Government is currently sponsoring a CivTech challenge on “how technology can help deliver a high-quality, scalable, model for public participation in decision-making”.
This piece of work supports the implementation of the Open Government Partnership’s declaration of principles, to which the Scottish Government is a signatory:
‘We value public participation of all people, equally and without discrimination, in decision making and policy formulation. Public engagement, including the full participation of women, increases the effectiveness of governments, which benefit from people’s knowledge, ideas and ability to provide oversight. We commit to making policy formulation and decision making more transparent, creating and using channels to solicit public feedback, and deepening public participation in developing, monitoring and evaluating government activities.’
The challenge is designed to supplement and increase the effectiveness of existing participatory engagement methods, as described in the Scottish Government Participation Handbook, not replace them with technology.
In particular, the Scottish AI Alliance is committed to creating opportunities for traditional methods of participatory engagement methods with the people of Scotland, from which we can explore person-centric approaches to AI and engagement on AI. This process will be influenced by our Community Advisory Group, for which recruitment is open until Mon 19 August, but will take the form of a pilot series of panels and a pilot assembly event where we bring representative groups together to discover the most effective ways to influence decision making around AI. From this process we will rollout a full, non-technological participatory mechanism within which we will be able to explore the potential opportunities of technological supplementation within engagement processes presented by the current CivTech challenge.