Voices in the Loop: Mapping Participatory AI

TL;DR

This paper presents an open, interactive atlas of participatory AI initiatives, providing a reproducible protocol, analyzing global patterns, and supporting governance and policy research.

Contribution

It introduces a reproducible method for documenting participatory AI projects and demonstrates how the atlas can facilitate governance, research, and community engagement.

Findings

Participatory AI initiatives are concentrated in a few countries.

Participation mostly occurs during problem formulation, evaluation, and governance.

The atlas enables ongoing updates, community feedback, and redaction requests.

Abstract

Participatory approaches to artificial intelligence are increasingly documented across public, civic, and humanitarian settings, but evidence about how participation is organized remains fragmented. This paper reports on the construction of an open repository and interactive atlas of participatory AI initiatives, using records harmonized from Maga~na and Shilton's Trustworthy AI corpus, and additional audited cases from research and practice. We contribute three elements. First, we specify a reproducible protocol for discovery, vetting, harmonization, geocoding, provenance tracking, and release-based publication of participatory AI records. Second, we report corpus-level patterns in geography, participation tiers, lifecycle loci, organizational form, verification status, and remaining documentation gaps. Documented initiatives remain concentrated in a small number of countries, while participation is most often coded at problem formulation, evaluation, and governance rather than model development or training. Third, we show how the atlas operationalizes a design and governance framework for participatory-by-default AI infrastructures through versioned releases, record-linked issue and annotation channels, schema feedback workflows, and redaction or restricted-disclosure requests. The atlas is intended to support comparative research, policy learning, and community scrutiny through a living inventory that can be updated, contested, and reused.