"Taking Stock at FAccT": Using Participatory Design to Co-Create a Vision for the Fairness, Accountability and Transparency Community

TL;DR

This paper details a participatory design process used to develop a shared vision and governance model for the ACM FAccT community, fostering inclusive dialogue on AI societal impacts.

Contribution

It introduces a large-scale participatory design approach applied to a conference setting, advancing co-design theory and practice in AI fairness communities.

Findings

Participants shaped the conference agenda through voting and discussions.

The process fostered critical voices and diverse perspectives in AI fairness discourse.

The case study demonstrates scalable participatory design for community governance.

Abstract

As a relatively new forum, ACM FAccT has become a key space for activists and scholars to critically examine emerging AI and ML technologies. It brings together academics, civil society members, and government representatives from diverse fields to explore the broader societal impacts of both deployed and proposed technologies. We report a large-scale participatory design (PD) process for reflexive conference governance, which combined an in-person CRAFT session, an asynchronous Polis poll and the synthesis of a governance-facing report for the FAccT leadership. Participants shaped the substantive agenda by authoring seed statements, adding new statements and making patterns of agreement, disagreement and uncertainty made visible through voting.Our endeavors represent one of the the first instances of applying PD to a venue that critically interrogates the societal impacts of AI, fostering a niche in which critical scholars are free to voice their concerns. Finally, this work advances large-scale PD theory by providing an effective case study of a co-design paradigm that can readily scale temporally and epistemologically.