Grassroots AI, Values & Building AI Learning Community
· 4:23
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- In the Room
Notes & highlights
Patrick Pennefather presents the Vancouver AI community-of-practice study as a prompt for the room: what makes a grassroots technology community worth returning to? At 00:33, he says meeting people there motivated him to collaborate with Kris Krüg and David Gaertner of a relational technology cluster at UBC on the Vancouver-centred study. He describes the paper as an examination of grassroots community-building mechanics at 01:14, then asks participants what sustains the group and what its essential ingredients are.
Pennefather argues that people entering uncertain technology work need to stay centred in their own values at 01:43. He adds that people rely on one another to remember those values because builders are a community, not individual "lone wolves," at 02:02. These are his recommendations, not findings that the recording measures.
In response, Krüg identifies sustained documentation as one of the practices discussed in the paper at 03:01. He says photographs and recorded talks leave a public trail of the community's work, then connects a recurring venue with a sense of place at 03:41. That reflection belongs to Krüg in the recording.
Read the BC Studies paper overview, browse the community spotlight playlist, or visit the Vancouver AI community.
Transcript (auto-generated)The full spoken text of this recording
YouTube generated this transcript from the recording. Kris Krüg checked the names in it against the recording. The wording and punctuation are still the machine’s, so quote from the video itself rather than from this page.
0:00Incoming transmission from the future Vancouver AI community meetup. Up next we got Patrick Pennefather. We've had an exciting thing happen. Um Pennefather and I have been collaborating for a while. Um but he's going to come up and talk about this BC studies research that was published last week um about you all. [Applause] Thank you Chris. So great to be here again. You know, a lot of my fond memories of last year has been people that I've met here. And I wanted to share that because that's what motivated me to collaborate with Chris and David Gartner from Cedar, which is a relational technology cluster at UBC, in order to write about building a grassroots AI community
0:50of practice, a Vancouver centric use case. All right, so it really is an easy read. Here you go, Sean. Have a read. You can probably finish it off by the time I'm done. I bought copies today and put them out at the table. You're welcome to buy one or take one if you have to.
1:10Thank you. Thank you, Chris. Uh, so in the book I talk about and we talk about the importance of building a grassroots community and kind of some of the mechanics of how to do that. So what I would love from all of you is your opinion on that like how do we sustain this type of community and what are the essential ingredients if you'd like in terms of like how do we like what is going to compel you to come back and and thanks again to Gabriel George for mentioning values because it's important to understand that as we all dive into this technology with all the known unknown and unknown unknowns of where it's going to go. We need to actually be
1:57centered in our own values. But I also believe we need to rely on others to remind us of what those values are because we are a community and and as we start to build this technology, we are not individual lone wolves. And if you are cool and talk with people because it's always better to belong to a pack. So I'm going to end it there and uh thank you to Chris as well for this event these meetups, right? Thanks Patrick. Thank you for including us all in your research. A lot of you guys know I'm doing work with government and other kind of industry nonprofits to legitimize and fund this thing as well as to bring about the
2:46creative industries uh AI accelerator of our dreams and stuff. And this type of stuff really opens doors and gets us called back when we're um making the claims about who we are and and what's going on around here. So, thanks for including us in that for sure, man. Um some of the things we talked about in there were like obsessive documentation was one of the pillars and we got folks like Michelle Diamond around here.
3:08Where's Michelle? Like this woman is like the best photographer of these types of things in the city and like this if she's here, you know, this is the best thing going on tonight or that someone else would have hired her to be somewhere else. Kevin Friel started up our YouTube channel with like we've been starting to pump out really high-end like keynotes. The these talks that happen up here in so much as they're valuable to us, they're even more valuable if we get share them out with the world. And gosh, it takes a lot of energy to get all this stuff together.
3:33So, we might as well put it down on the permanent record, you know, and stuff and um leave a leave a little breadcrumb trail of where we've been. And um so, and the venue here, you know, like that was another this used to be in my studio for a year. Now, it's here for a year.
3:46Sometimes our events are in like restaurants or commercial spaces or bars or different things, but it just doesn't feel exactly like home. And it doesn't allow you to kind of like move in and make it your own in the way and kind of give us a sense of place. I think that's amplified by the fact that we've been on this journey about this land and the buildings that are being built there and our Squamish and Slave with Tooth brothers and sisters been coming around sharing their story with us. So, that's a part of it as well. Anyway, read the article. It's not just fluff. It's um it's academic research.
4:14[Music] [Applause]