Stefaan Verhulst

Playbook by Eric Hysen: “…evaluates the risks and benefits of governmental adoption of artificial intelligence (AI). The paper offers a comprehensive analysis of public-sector AI governance, from its systems and frameworks to approaches and policies, as well as a shifting federal emphasis on the speed of adoption and on reducing regulatory burden. Drawing on a comparative literature review and interviews, this pragmatic playbook guides leaders in building and implementing AI governance in public-sector organizations to ensure AI is safe, ethical, secure, and aligned with mission and values…(More)”

Book edited by Katja Mayer, Astrid Mager and Renée Ridgway: “This volume examines how openness is designed, governed, contested and lived in contemporary digital knowledge infrastructures. From open source software and internet standards, to citizen science platforms, public sector data systems and alternative computing practices, the book shows that infrastructures are never neutral technical backbones. They are deeply political arrangements that embed values, distribute power and shape whose knowledge counts.

Bringing together scholars from science and technology studies, critical data studies, media studies, organisation studies, arts-based research and political sociology, this edited volume explores openness as an ongoing socio-technical process rather than a fixed ideal. The book moves from the partial openness of early Internet standards and free and open source software, through contested practices of opening government data and public infrastructures, to struggles over inclusion and governance in scholarly and cultural knowledge infrastructures. This is followed by community-driven experiments in care, repair and alternative openness and concludes with forward-looking contributions on how to keep infrastructures open for research, how to fund infrastructures as digital commons and how to mobilise open infrastructures for democratic resilience and economic sovereignty.

The contributions trace how principles such as accessibility, transparency, participation and collective stewardship are enacted in practice—and how they are challenged by commercial capture, asymmetries of expertise, cultural governance and geopolitical inequalities. Across theoretical chapters and rich empirical case studies, the book investigates the governance of open infrastructures, the politics of alternative technological arrangements and struggles for epistemic justice within knowledge systems.

By foregrounding power relations, ethical tensions and questions of responsibility, this book rethinks openness as a site of political negotiation rather than a technical solution. The volume offers critical insights for researchers, policymakers, engineers and civil society actors concerned with digital commons, democratic governance and the future of open knowledge infrastructures in increasingly contested political and technical environments.

A companion website, www.openinfrastructures.net , extends the volume through author interviews, supplementary materials and additional resources that document the making of the book and provide further insights into the debates on governing, sustaining, and contesting open digital knowledge infrastructures…(More)”.

Paper by Gal Yona, Mor Geva, and Yossi Matias: “Despite significant strides in factual reliability, errors — often termed hallucinations — remain a major concern for generative AI, especially as LLMs are increasingly expected to be helpful in more complex or nuanced setups. Yet even in the simplest setting — factoid question-answering with clear ground truth-frontier models without external tools continue to hallucinate. We argue that most factuality gains in this domain have come from expanding the model’s knowledge boundary (encoding more facts) rather than improving awareness of that boundary (distinguishing known from unknown). We conjecture that the latter is inherently difficult: models may lack the discriminative power to perfectly separate truths from errors, creating an unavoidable tradeoff between eliminating hallucinations and preserving utility.
This tradeoff dissolves under a different framing. If we understand hallucinations as confident errors — incorrect information delivered without appropriate qualification — a third path emerges beyond the answer-or-abstain dichotomy: expressing uncertainty. We propose faithful uncertainty: aligning linguistic uncertainty with intrinsic uncertainty. This is one facet of metacognition — the ability to be aware of one’s own uncertainty and to act on it. For direct interaction, acting on uncertainty means communicating it honestly; for agentic systems, it becomes the control layer governing when to search and what to trust. Metacognition is thus essential for LLMs to be both trustworthy and capable; we conclude by highlighting open problems for progress towards this objective…(More)”.

Article by Anna Tumadóttir and Sarah Hinchliff Pearson: “When it comes to AI, copyright operates in a landscape that is uneven and often unclear. Because of this, the CC licenses, while still important, are not sufficient to address how content is used in AI systems. You can read more on this here. CC licenses also do not fully capture the range of intentions creators and data holders have in an AI-mediated world.

Across the web, creators, communities, and institutions are turning to multiple forms of defensive enclosure to restrict access. These include:

• Legal (e.g. licensing), such as open access publishers recommending CC BY-NC-ND as a mechanism of control, which ACM now does, which negatively impacts human collaboration.
• Technical (e.g. CAPTCHAs, bot blocking, rate limiting), such as what news publishers are doing, which negatively impacts archiving efforts.
• Financial (e.g. paywalled APIs), such as what X did post-acquisition, which negatively impacts researchers. 

The problem is that these tools treat all machine use as the same, regardless of the purpose. In trying to limit large-scale extraction by AI developers, they also block public interest uses like research, preservation, and accessibility.

While our research is ongoing, there are early indications of a more fragmented and potentially shrinking commons, along with a weakening of long-standing public interest protections…(More)”.

Book by Geoff Mulgan: “… explores innovation in the public sector, examining the mindsets, methods and strategies needed for success at every stage. It draws on global case studies to showcase key practical tools that can support innovation across local, regional and national governments.

Key Features:

• Demonstrates how to generate, gather and assess promising ideas
• Evaluates the role of markets and competition
• Presents approaches used to identify, spread and scale efficient new methods
• Highlights ways to prevent government and political environments from crushing imaginative risk-taking
• Covers the benefits and drawbacks of diverse methods, from the organisation of specialist teams and labs to systemic change, and from different models of finance to the use of data and AI

Providing an accessible and rigorous framework, this Advanced Introduction is essential reading for practitioners working in both city and national governments, as well as scholars and students of public policy, public sector economics, regulation and governance, administration, management and organisational innovation…(More)”.

Article by Stefaan Verhulst and Artur Kluz: “The release of Pope Leo XIV’s new Encyclical Letter Magnifica Humanitas — On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence marks an important intervention in one of the defining debates of our time: how humanity should govern and direct technological power of artificial intelligence in service of the human person. While much of the global press coverage has understandably focused on the document’s warnings regarding autonomous weapons systems and the urgent call to “disarm AI,” the encyclical is ultimately much broader and more ambitious. At its core, it is not simply a warning against dangerous technologies; it is a reflection about safeguarding the human person, the meaning of peace, human dignity, and the moral responsibilities that accompany technological development. As such, it contributes to a broader moral and normative understanding of why PeaceTech matters…(More)”.

Blog by Jack Strachan: “Over the last two decades, governments across the world have built hundreds of innovation labs, policy labs, behavioural insights teams and multidisciplinary transformation units. They emerged from a growing recognition that traditional institutional structures were struggling to respond to complexity, digital transformation and increasingly interconnected public problems. Labs offered a different organisational form: protected spaces within existing systems where smaller multidisciplinary teams could experiment outside normal bureaucratic logic.

And for a while, they worked remarkably well.

The early generation of public sector innovation labs genuinely changed government. Denmark’s MindLab helped bring ethnographic and participatory approaches into policymaking long before most governments were seriously talking about user-centred design. Helsinki Design Lab explored how strategic design could help states work across interconnected systems rather than departmental silos. Policy Lab UK experimented with multidisciplinary approaches inside Whitehall, while the early GDS movement in 2011 fundamentally reshaped expectations about what public digital services could be.

These were not vanity projects or post-it-note theatres. They produced rigorous work, brought new professions into government, changed the legitimacy of user-centred design inside the state and created new ways of understanding public problems. More importantly, they created conditions most institutions struggle to sustain – protected authority, proximity to decision-making, permission to experiment and the ability to generate evidence through building rather than reporting…

But over time, many of these environments lost the conditions that had made them effective in the first place…(More)”.

Article by the Australian Resilient Democracy Network: “…The civic life journey concept views the progression of an individual’s relationship with society through different stages of civic life. Whilst key stages of the journey are defined by age, they can also be differentiated across other factors and life experiences – such as where people live, experiences of disability or different cultural backgrounds.

The civic life course approach includes analysis of transition points in individual’s life course, such as from school into workforce or out of workforce. It also seeks to disaggregate preferences for when, how and where to engage. It seeks to use this analysis and framing to target programs and support to increase access to opportunities across each of the life course stages.

This Figure above presents a simplified model of the civic life course. It outlines three interacting elements of the civic life journey: civic literacy (knowledge and skills for democratic participation), civic participation (actions and behaviours that contribute to public life), and civic connection (belonging, agency, cohesion and responsibility developed through engagement).

We know from national surveys that meaningful civic engagement and education are protective factors against the declining trust in institutions and growing polarisation that liberal democracies including Australia are experiencing (see APSC Civic Education and Democratic Perceptions). While young people report sharply lower senses of belonging and Australia’s national standardised NAPLAN Civics and Citizenship exams show declining understanding of how our government works, more than half of Australians report feeling their voices are not heard in key public decisions.

But we don’t monitor these patterns or disentangle practical insights on when and where people prefer to engage, what access they have to opportunities, what barriers they face, and when civic engagement is most meaningful. Surveys suggest those who are active in their communities report higher trust and satisfaction with our democratic systems…(More)”

Article by Madeleine I. G. Daepp,  Kiran Tomlinson, Scott Counts & Siddharth Suri: “Knowledge work has been key to economic flourishing in most advanced and many emerging economies in the last half century. Defined by the synthesis and creation of ideas rather than the production of physical goods, knowledge work involves the processing of non-routine problems that require judgment-based and creative intellectual capabilities. Such work is a large and important component of contemporary economies, accounting for an estimated third to half of all jobs in high-income countries and a fifth of all jobs globally. Achieving sustained economic growth increasingly depends on the ability to leverage and create knowledge, with countries actively seeking to transition to knowledge economies to improve their economic outcomes. Knowledge work is also the foremost application for which workers are using generative artificial intelligence (AI). A critical question for the future of twenty-first-century economies, then, is whether generative AI could democratize knowledge work by expanding the set of people who can engage in and benefit from it.

Generative AI’s effect on knowledge work hinges on emerging challenges along those two dimensions: (1) who benefits from AI’s use and (2) who actually uses AI. In this Perspective, we synthesize recent empirical work to map out these challenges and describe both technical and policy interventions to mitigate harms and ensure that benefits are widely shared. Technological and institutional fixes will need to be developed in tandem. Policies will need to be calibrated—towards either sharing productivity gains or building skills—according to what current models enable, and tooling will need to be made broadly usable if AI literacy and adoption pushes are to be effective in closing persistent participation gaps…(More)”.

Article by John Fell, Sándor Gardó, Domenic Kellner, Benjamin Klaus, Jan Hannes Lang, Lukas Nagy, Pucho Vendrell, Marek Rusnák, Jonas Wendelborn and Stefan Wredenborg: “Financial stability communication is challenging because its task is not to forecast financial crises, let alone predict their precise timing. Rather, it is to identify vulnerabilities and explain how the financial system is likely to fare should it be confronted with adverse shocks. Great care is needed in this endeavour, because the sentiment of financial stability communication can influence market perceptions and risk assessments, as well as broader economic and financial outcomes. Given the presence of this potential feedback loop, the task of financial stability communication at the ECB has long been guided by a broad concept of financial stability: the smooth allocation of financial resources, effective management of risk by financial institutions and the capacity of the financial system to absorb shocks. Using the messages conveyed in the ECB’s Financial Stability Review over two decades, this special feature compares dictionary-based, FinBERT and prompt-based AI approaches to extracting financial stability sentiment. It finds broad co-movement across methods, while the GPT-based filter isolates sentences that contain explicit risk assessments, capturing subtle shifts in tone and context that were previously difficult to quantify. Used carefully, such tools can support risk monitoring and drafting consistency over time, but they remain complementary to expert judgement, vulnerability analysis and stress testing, rather than substitutes for it. A deep-dive box in the special feature also shows how AI can be used to systematically extract information from financial news to create an indicator for the severity and probability of triggers (SPOT) for financial stability risks…(More)”.