Stefaan Verhulst
Article by Anthony Vargas: “For publishers, getting cited in AI chatbot responses isn’t enough. They also want those answers to reflect their editorial judgment and the culture of the communities they cover.
A new initiative called SAIL – which stands for Standardized Agentic Intelligence Ledger – aims to do both, compensating publishers when AI scrapes their content and guaranteeing the outputs adhere to the same cultural standards they apply to their own coverage.
The framework was designed by AI licensing platform Next Net in partnership with Sundial Media & Technology Group, the publisher of Essence, Refinery29 and Afropunk, among others.
SAIL is a digital record-keeping system that tracks how AI solutions use publisher content and mix it with other sources, said Sundial CEO Kirk McDonald. It’s meant to protect the value of high-quality publisher content when it’s cited by AI alongside less rigorous – but still culturally relevant – user-generated content.
Think of the framework as a more collaborative alternative to striking one-off licensing deals with AI vendors, McDonald said, or to the nuclear option of suing them over unauthorized content scraping…(More)”.
Paper by Francesco Nasi: “While many debates frequently emphasize the threats artificial intelligence poses to democratic life, scholars are increasingly examining the role AI may play in supporting democracies. However, little attention has been given to a crucial question: how and under what conditions AI can be considered democratic, not only in its design but also in its societal outcomes. I argue that AI is democratic when it is democratically empowering, meaning it contributes to redistributing power and creating symmetrical power relations rather than centralizing them. This argument is rooted in the framework of participatory democracy, which prioritizes the active involvement of the citizenry and the redistribution of power across all social spheres. Drawing on participatory democracy, Foucauldian and Actor-Network Theory perspectives, the paper identifies three essential features of power that are needed for theorizing democratic AI: the pervasiveness of power relations in everyday life, the agency of technological artifacts understood as “actants”, and the way power structures relations that can be more or less symmetrical. To assess whether and how AI may be deemed democratic, the paper suggests investigating how AI shapes power dynamics in two dimensions: AI making (development, design, political economy, governance, and imaginaries) and AI action (how AI operates in fields like education, healthcare, information, and politics). This approach helps to take into account the complexity and ambiguity of power dynamics, critically examining whether and how AI contribute to the redistribution of power across different domains. Ultimately, this theoretical framework provides a roadmap for developers and policymakers interested in promoting a more democratic AI…(More)”.
Article by Daniella Fernández, and Andrea Paola Hernández: “After twin earthquakes struck northern Venezuela last month, thousands of people took to social media, pleading for help locating friends and family. The interim government was slow to act, but help came quickly from an unexpected source: developers and programmers.
“Who knew when the government was going to respond?” Jorge Bastidas, a 31-year-old Venezuelan programmer who lives in Buenos Aires, told Rest of World. “We decided to take action.”
Bastidas and his team of six created Desaparecidos Terremoto Venezuela, a website for citizens to report, identify, and reunite with missing family and friends. Using Claude Opus 4.8, and facial recognition software donated by Mexican company Lab-Co, Bastidas designed the site to load quickly, without requiring users to register or download an app. It received more than 30,000 missing-person reports in the first two days, he said.
Without AI, “it would have taken me about 24 hours without rest to build something that took me three hours,” Bastidas said…(More)”.
Review by Matt Elmore: “Byung-Chul Han is one of Europe’s most widely read philosophers. His audience in the United States has grown considerably over the last decade, though mostly outside the academy; in 2024, the New Yorker dubbed him “The Internet’s New Favorite Philosopher” — an ironic label for a thinker who keeps his distance from the online world. His latest book, The Tonality of Thought, gathers three public lectures that serve as windows into his work and way of life. In its own way, the book makes sense of why his writing has struck a chord in the digital age.
Han grew up in South Korea and now lives in Berlin. Most mornings, he begins his day not with his phone, not with email or headlines, but with Bach. A Steinway grand piano sits in his apartment, where he plays the aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations — a spare, unhurried theme that opens and closes a set of thirty short pieces. He calls the piano his prayer wheel, like those found in temple courtyards across Asia. At the piano, he says, he does not so much think as let thinking take place. “For me, thinking is thanking.” When he plays, thoughts arrive like visitors, and he answers them with a quiet grazie.
A few steps from the piano stands an art nouveau writing desk. Every day he walks back and forth between the piano and his desk — twenty times, by his count — returning to Bach when he has no words. Han is a philosopher, though not the kind the last century prized. He builds no system, offers no program, stages no revolution. Nor does he stop at the unmasking of power. His books are unsparing in their critique of digital capitalism, but they do not end in critique; they rest on a deeper sense of beauty, friendship, and transcendence — themes as old as philosophy itself.
For more than two decades, Han has shaped a form of writing equal to his concerns: brief, concentrated books that think in movements rather than arguments. Their brevity feels deliberate, as if composed for the attention economy yet guided by another sense of time. Winding through subjects as varied as Zen, smartphones, and gardening, they often return to the same question: What has become of freedom in the digital age?..(More)”.
Coursebook by BJ Ard & Rebecca Crootof: “Technology law (“techlaw”) is the study of how law and technology foster, restrict, and otherwise shape each other’s evolution. New technologies raise questions for every area of the law, and the strategies and rhetorical arguments deployed to regulate technology and its impacts are helpful tools to have across legal contexts. Accordingly, this coursebook identifies common techlaw questions and presents a methodology for thoughtfully resolving them.
This coursebook is intended to be accessible and useful to all students, regardless of career interests or prior experience with technology. Each chapter includes “Comprehension Checks,” intended to be addressed by the reader in context, and “Discussion Questions” and “Putting It All Together” closers, which we have found to be helpful springboards for class discussion…(More)”.
Study published by the National Library of the Netherlands (KB) and the Europeana Foundation: “This document identifies a pathway to establishing the core of the European Books Data Commons: a shared infrastructure that would make the full text of millions of digitised public domain books held by libraries across Europe available for re-use in forms optimised for AI developers and researchers working with large-scale language datasets. If implemented, the EBDC would constitute a significant contribution to the European Commission’s 2025 Data Union Strategy, which aims to ensure that European AI developers have access to high quality data including cultural heritage collections.
The remainder of the document is structured as follows. Section 2 sets out the proposition — the demand for digitised public domain books and the supply-side constraints that currently prevent access to existing collections. Section 3 presents the recommended implementation scenario, arrived at through a process of developing, testing, and progressively refining a set of options with library partners and the steering group. Section 4 addresses the governance of the system and its relationship to related European initiatives. Section 5 outlines the way forward, including a two-track implementation approach, an integrated timeline, and indicative cost estimates. Section 6 makes the case for acting now to build the European Books Data Commons…(More)”.
Project developed by iMMAP, CartONG, HOT and Kobo with the formal support and endorsement of ICVA Network, InterAction, H2H Network and Sphere: “… Humanitarian Information Landscape Assessment (HILA) is an innovative framework designed to measure the health of humanitarian information ecosystems and identify the systemic barriers that prevent evidence-based decision-making on the ground.
Building on country-level applications, the global HILA combines a standardized online survey for humanitarian practitioners with a live public dashboard — updated in real time and repeated twice a year to track change over time.
The result is a global monitoring system — not a one-off snapshot — providing humanitarian leaders, donors, and operational partners with a unique, comparable evidence base to guide investment, coordination, and response…(More)”.
Report by DemNext: “Cities are messy, complex, diverse, beautiful places – they are where most people live. Even for those who don’t live in a city, there are policies, budgets, and place-based strategies implemented by decision makers which shape the places they call home. From the neighbourhoods we live in, the public services we have access to, and how we move around, cities and regions are the places where decision making impacts us greatly. At the same time, most people don’t have opportunities to truly shape these decisions. Citizens’ assemblies offer a way to tackle this when they are embedded as part of our democratic infrastructure.
Establishing an ongoing citizens’ assembly while building supportive civic infrastructure requires a completely different mindset than implementing a one-off assembly. It needs to be approached like a marathon, not a sprint. Investing early in what comes after a first assembly is fundamental to building new democratic institutions. Doing so leads to catalytic ripple effects that impact how we fund, innovate, reimagine, and intentionally cultivate new forms of democratic infrastructure.
Those ripple effects begin with decisions made long before assembly members convene for the first time. Starting with this mindset makes it easier to consider how a citizens’ assembly, and those involved in implementing it, are not only people delivering a process, but catalysts for wider change with enduring impact. (Chwalisz & McKinney, 2026).
To us, this means establishing citizens’ assemblies not as one-off events, dependent on political will at a moment in time, but as new institutions, to which power can be shifted. It’s about the establishment of an institution that is embedded in law, parliamentary rules, or binding policy frameworks and the shift in norms and cultures that goes along with this.
We offer guidance and inspiration about how to get there, reflecting on the lessons from DemocracyNext’s Cities Programme and our experience as advisors to two cities and two regions across three continents – Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg, Vilnius, Lithuania, Kerewan, The Gambia, and Central Oregon, USA. We also dive into the impact that the assembly has on members and others involved in the entire process...(More)“
Report by the UK Government Office for Science (GO-Science): “… first developed a set of AI 2030 scenarios in 2023, which were published in 2025 (Government Office for Science, 2025). These aimed to help policymakers navigate uncertainty surrounding the future of AI and prepare for its risks and opportunities. They have been used widely across government and are in regular demand.
Since 2023, the AI landscape has changed profoundly, with AI capabilities, investment, and adoption having increased significantly, alongside dramatic shifts in geopolitics. GO-Science has therefore produced an updated set of scenarios to account for these developments, outlined in this report…(More)”.
Paper by Stefaan Verhulst: “Across a range of fast growing urban markets, private developers are constructing a version of the smart city that operates largely outside the purview of municipal government, often at the explicit invitation of city officials seeking to shift the cost and complexity of digital infrastructure onto private capital. Gated residential and mixed use developments are increasingly marketed not merely on the basis of security and amenity, but on their smartness: integrated home automation, app mediated access control, and centralized energy and resource management, among other features. We refer to this phenomenon as the smart compound. Despite its rapid proliferation, it has received comparatively little sustained scholarly attention: the literatures on smart cities and on gated communities have developed largely independently of one another, even as developers are, in practice, merging the two. This paper introduces the smart compound as an emerging real estate and urban development phenomenon, considers the opportunities and risks it presents, and examines how questions of data governance differ when smart urban infrastructure is built and owned privately rather than publicly. It concludes with a set of research questions intended to orient researchers, planners, and regulators toward a phenomenon whose growth is outpacing the scholarship meant to account for it…(More)”.