Dr Laura James's writings

Testing the Uber self-driving system. Image:  ABC News In a complex world, with technologies and ideas spreading more quickly than ever before, our traditional ways of balancing the needs of society and industry may not work so well, and so we need to be experimenting with alternatives. So last week,  Doteveryone  and  Dark Matter Laboratories  brought together a small diverse group to explore the idea of  regulatory experiments,  and what a network of organisations working on, and learning from these, might look like and do. Moving from “regulation” to “governance” We realised during the day that we were actually interested in  governance experiments . Regulation is a specific form of governance. It makes people think of  regulators  and therefore take a more limited view of the possibilities. Opening it up and thinking instead of  governance  means we can think about very different ideas, such as  ennobli...

The  AI for Global Good summit  brought together UN agencies, researchers and innovators to explore the potential of AI to address the  Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) . This was the second summit, and came with expectations and scheduling that it was time to get some new collaborative projects underway. It’s hard to tell whether it met that aim — several groups of projects (mostly proposed, or indeed underway, before the summit) were showcased and encouraged participation (and resourcing) from those present. The idea of a community, in the sense it is often meant, was less clearly supported — how will participants (both in the room, and following online) stay in touch and build up these new ideas? The summit did succeed in showcasing projects and ideas across sector and subject boundaries, and it seemed like the right people were in the room to start planning some concrete projects. At the same time, it felt like some important things were missing. One of those t...

The  Digital Life Collective  started in 2017, a new member owned co-op aiming to develop and support  Tech We Trust —  technologies that prioritise our autonomy, privacy and dignity — and we just wrote up a  report  of what we’ve been up to. It’s been a fascinating experience, seeing a new co-operative come to life. Unanticipated challenge: despite tech we don’t trust being such a hot topic in so many circles in 2017, it has proved surprisingly tough to get members to join. Maybe we’re too vague on what we’ll do and how we’ll do it? Or are many of the vocally worried people still not at the tipping point where concern starts to motivate action? Or something else? Hopefully in 2018 we’ll get a lot clearer on why you’d join today, and how we’ll achieve our mission of making sure the technology we all use is tech we trust. Unexpected emergence: some members have created the Social Ledger, a new way to coordinate and organise information and effort. Still in...

Photo by  Fleur Treurniet  on  Unsplash People often ask me what technologies Doteveryone cares about. (Is it about broadband access? Privacy? AI? Data ethics?) The real answer is that our work is not so much about specific technologies as it is specific challenges. It’s about systems — how people and organisations and society and technology interact — not individual technologies in and of themselves. (You can see this in  our thinking around the different aspects of responsible technology , which cut across technical and business issues as both are often intertwined.) So we aim to tackle issues with technology today (and tomorrow!), some of which relate to specific technology fields, and some of which are quite general. There’s no shortage of interesting work to be done, and luckily we are not alone — many other great organisations and projects are thinking about many of these topics too. Here’s some of what we’re thinking about, now and into 2018. Domi...

Yesterday was a reflective workshop for the  Maker Assembly  community. I was inspired to organise  an event to celebrate maintenance and maintainers (more about this below), but we covered a lot of other ground too. Maker Assembly’s tweet and photo of the event A lot of maker culture is about making new things, and in many Western contexts, that’s making gadgets and gizmos that are fun for a while but generally then gather dust until eventually thrown away. Making and fixing useful things happens, but often in less visible places —  farmers repairing and modifying their equipment ,  making and fixing in rural areas , and around the world  local   manufacturing  and  hacking  and  reuse  where it’s the  only option to save  and  sustain   life . (We used to do more of that here, making do and mending, but of late that’s declined as consumer goods became more affordable, and often cheaper to replace ...