Stefaan Verhulst

UK government: “Local AI is a new team in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), working with councils to support the responsible use of artificial intelligence (AI) across local government. We focus on the real pressures councils face and work in partnership with the sector to tackle shared problems…Over the past year, we’ve focused on understanding where AI can add the most value in local government. This has included:

• discovery work on pressures in temporary accommodation services and the potential to scale an AI transcription and summarisation tool developed by the Incubator for AI (i.AI)
• close collaboration with partners across the sector, including Local Digital, GDS Local, i.AI and the Local Government Association
• participation in the Local Government Innovation Hackathon on Homelessness and Rough Sleeping
• establishing the Mayoral Data Council to improve data quality and availability.

This work has shown that well targeted AI can reduce administrative burden, free up frontline time and support earlier, more consistent interventions.

What we’re doing now

We are moving into delivery and expanding our work in areas where AI can make a practical difference. This includes:

• incubating high impact use cases in temporary accommodation
• developing a new transcription tool for public-facing workers based on i.AI’s Minute tool.
• running further discovery work in other service areas
• learning from local innovation and identifying ideas that can be reused
• supporting councils to strengthen data quality, ethics and safety practices.

This helps ensure we are solving the right problems and that councils help shape our roadmap from the start…(More)” – See also AI Localism

Paper by Sofie Illemann Jæger & Julian;Iñaki Goñi: “In this article, we assert that public participation events are best understood as scaffoldings that provide temporal infrastructures to citizens and that encourage “preferred ways” of acting within the participatory space. To exemplify this approach, we explore the citizens’ climate assembly (2022–2023) in Aarhus, Denmark as a case study of highly professionalised participation. Through a multi-method qualitative approach incorporating participant observation, focus groups, interviews, and surveys, we examine how both organisers and citizen members of the assembly perceive its design and implementation. In our results, we highlight two dimensions of the assembly’s scaffolding. Firstly, we analyse the guidelines that assembly organisers provided to signal what good interaction is within the assembly, namely, the Observation, Assessment, and Recommendation (OVA) method. This method shaped the affordances of members but also defined the epistemic hierarchies of contributions. Secondly, we analyse how the purpose of involving citizens in decision-making was constructed by assembly organisers and how it was communicated during the assembly, leading to uncertainties in process design and facilitation. Finally, we draw methodological and theoretical lessons from this case study and conclude that by treating participatory events as both structured and structuring, we can move beyond evaluations of participation as an ideal to be realised and instead investigate its situated practices and contestations…(More)”.

Open Access Book edited by Alessandra Micalizzi: “…explores one of the most pressing transformations of contemporary knowledge production: the integration of artificial intelligence into the practices, methods, and epistemologies of the social sciences. Moving beyond simplistic narratives of automation and efficiency, this volume investigates AI as object, tool, context, and partner of research. Bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives, the contributions examine how algorithmic systems reshape inquiry, interpretation, and representation, while also raising fundamental methodological and ethical questions. From AI-assisted qualitative analysis and ethnography to digital imaginaries, bias, and futures thinking, the chapters reveal the complex co-production between technological systems and social knowledge. Rather than offering definitive answers, the book provides conceptual tools, empirical cases, and methodological reflections for navigating a rapidly evolving research landscape. It invites scholars to engage critically and creatively with artificial intelligence—not as a distant technology, but as an active participant in the construction of contemporary social understanding…(More)”.

Annual Report by Freedom House: “Global freedom declined for the 20th consecutive year in 2025. A total of 54 countries experienced deterioration in their political rights and civil liberties, while only 35 countries registered improvements.

The largest declines in freedom for the calendar year were caused by military coups and efforts by incumbent leaders to crush peaceful dissent or change constitutional rules in their favor. Guinea-Bissau received the year’s single largest score change, losing 8 points on Freedom in the World’s 100-point scale after the November general elections were disrupted by a coup in which armed men stormed the election commission’s office and destroyed ballots. Military officers also ousted the elected government in Madagascar, bringing the total number of African countries to have experienced a coup since 2019 to nine. In Burkina Faso, which has been under military rule since a 2022 coup, the score declined by 5 points as state security forces and junta-sponsored militias engaged in mass killings and forced displacement of Fulani civilians, while Islamist insurgents attacked people of other faiths and imposed their own religious practices in areas under their control.

Tanzania registered the second most significant deterioration in rights and liberties in 2025, losing 7 points and sinking further into the Not Free category. The incumbent president, Samia Suluhu Hassan, was declared the winner of an election marred by the exclusion of opposition candidates, restrictions on the media, a campaign of forced disappearances of political opponents, and widespread violence against protesters that resulted in at least 1,000 deaths. El Salvador tied with Madagascar for the third largest decline in the world, losing 5 points. Salvadoran authorities persecuted high-profile academics who were critical of the government, threats against the media drove journalists into exile, and the government seized land without providing compensation. The Legislative Assembly, dominated by President Nayib Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas party, passed a constitutional reform that abolished presidential term limits and extended the terms from five to six years, clearing the way for Bukele to seek reelection indefinitely…(More)”.

Article by Ioannes Chountis de Fabbri: “Jürgen Habermas’ enduring work began in the coffee-houses of Georgian London. His deepest insight was, in the end, a conservative one.

Georgian London had around 3,000 coffee houses. For a penny a cup, a merchant, a shopkeeper or a gentleman could sit down together, read the newspapers spread before them, and argue about the affairs of Parliament, the conduct of the war against France, or the merits of the latest edition of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s Spectator. The most powerful account of this world, and of its destruction, was perhaps unexpectedly written not by an English historian but by a German philosopher born into a provincial middle-class household in North Rhine-Westphalia, who died on Saturday in the Bavarian town of Starnberg at the age of 96.

Jürgen Habermas was born in 1929 into the kind of provincial, educated German household that had neither resisted nor much assisted Hitler’s regime. At 15 he was sent to the Western Front in the last chaotic months of the war. What followed shaped his cultural and political outlook: the Nuremberg revelations, the slow reckoning with what had been done in Germany’s name against the Jews, and a conviction, arrived at young and never abandoned, that the liberal constitutional state as it had developed in the English-speaking world represented a genuine civilisational achievement. Years later he described himself, with characteristic precision, as a ‘product of re-education’…(More)”.

Article by Arthur Mensch: “Europe is a land of creators. The continent has nurtured ideas that have enriched, and continue to enrich, the world’s intellectual and creative landscape. Its diverse and multilingual heritage remains one of its greatest strengths, central not only to its identity and soft power but also to its economic vitality.

All this is at risk as AI reshapes the global knowledge economy.

Major AI companies in the US and China are developing their models under permissive or non-existent copyright rules, training them domestically on vast amounts of content — including from European sources.

European AI developers, by contrast, operate in a fragmented legal environment that places them at a competitive disadvantage. The current opt-out framework, designed to enable rights holders to protect their content and prevent AI companies from using it for training if they say so, has proven unworkable in practice. Copyrighted works continue to spread uncontrollably online, while the legal mechanisms designed to protect them remain patchy, inconsistently applied and overly complex.

The result is a framework that satisfies no one. Rights holders correctly fear for their livelihoods yet see no clear path to protection. AI developers face legal uncertainty that hampers investment and growth.

Europe needs to explore a new approach.

At Mistral, we are proposing a revenue-based levy that would be applied to all commercial providers placing AI models on the market or putting them into service in Europe, reflecting their use of content publicly available online…(More)”.

Article by Barrett and Greene: “Since GenAI first appeared on the scene in late 2022, both benefits and hazards have been chronicled in multiple places, including this website. Advantages of AI play out on a daily basis providing cities and counties quicker results, increased staff efficiency, and improved government-resident communications. 

But as generative AI use took off, media reports surfaced of fabrications delivered in response to prompts (known as hallucinations) and factual errors that were embarrassing and sometimes costly for governments and their vendors.  

“If you don’t have a strategy or plan in place for how you deal with AI hazards, you’re going to get in trouble very fast,” says Brian Funderburk, an advocate for the responsible use of AI in government, and a retired city manager in Texas with 40 years of experience in local government.

The litany of problematic uses of AI seems to grow every day as its use expands. Just for starters, there have been fictitious precedents cited in legal cases. Chatbot errors have also surfaced with some frequency, notably in the much-heralded chatbot designed for businesses developed by New York City in the fall of 2023, that was roundly criticized the following spring for giving business callers incorrect information and sometimes advising them to engage in illegal behavior. 

Multiple companies have had to deal with the consequences of AI mistakes, including Deloitte, which agreed to refund the equivalent of $290,000 in U.S. dollars to the Australian government for a report “that was littered with apparent AI-generated errors,” according to an AP News report. 

Although hallucinations that AI can conjure have diminished to some extent, the continuing threat of errors requires extensive double-checking and triple-checking by humans that bear responsibility for what’s produced. “It will be a while before we can trust AI unconditionally,” says Funderburk who is currently Vice President and AI Safety Officer at Civic Marketplace…(More)”.

Book edited by Crystal Chokshi and Robin Mansell: “This book is about words that fool us into thinking that the digital technologies we use every day are beautiful, benign, and consequence-free. The collection shows how metaphors used by Big Tech to promote digital technologies are reductive or misleading. With a commitment to social justice, the contributors rename digital technologies in order to subvert Big Tech’s branding. Each chapter discusses a specific technology, rechristening it in a way that points explicitly to the social and political harms it is associated with. The alternative vocabularies that are proposed draw attention to what these technologies bring about, providing a means of resisting Silicon Valley’s claims about what people and organisations should buy and experience…(More)”.

Paper by Ricardo Coelho Da Silva, Leid Zejnilović, Marco Berti, Miguel Pina e Cunha and Pedro Oliveira: “When crises strike, new forms of emergent organizing often arise to address urgent societal needs that formal institutions struggle to meet. Among these, emergent response groups (ERGs)—self-organized communities that form to respond to unexpected and extreme events—offer a particularly salient example of decentralized and nonhierarchical organizing. This multicase study investigates eight ERGs that formed during the COVID-19 pandemic to design and distribute critical medical supplies. Drawing on sensemaking theory, we show how bricolage—making do with at-hand resources—supports coordination and community structuring by reducing equivocality caused by distributed actors. Our findings describe how these ERGs grew rapidly by using bricolage to reduce action, goal, and resource equivocality, enabling coordinated and scalable crisis response efforts. We contribute to research on emergent organizing in crisis contexts by revealing how bricolage fosters coherence and rapid scaling in the absence of formal hierarchies. Our study also challenges the dominant assumption that bricolage is inherently limiting to organizational growth, showing that—in the context of self-organizing collectives—it offers a novel solution to the problem of coordinating action among distributed agents…(More)”.

OECD: “Measuring digital transformation is a key component of designing and implementing evidence-based policies. Yet measuring the digital parts of the economy is complex, in part because digital technologies and data are everywhere to some extent, rendering the notion of a siloed “digital economy” obsolete. Key challenges to measuring digital transformation include improving the international comparability of priority indicators and ensuring that statistical systems are flexible and responsive to the introduction of new and rapidly evolving concepts driven by digital technologies and data. Looking ahead, the challenge for the statistical community is to design new and interdisciplinary approaches to data collection and analysis, and to strengthen data infrastructure capabilities. Moreover, partnerships with the private sector and engagement with stakeholders to bring reliable and representative data that is gathered with trust into the policymaking process is an important overarching objective.

To address these challenges, it is important to not only identify common priorities (i.e. what to measure) but also common approaches (i.e. how to measure). The OECD Going Digital Measurement Roadmap 2026 (the Roadmap) aims to support and encourage a co-ordinated approach to digital measurement activities among key actors in the international statistical system. It includes ten actions aimed at advancing the capacity of countries to monitor digital transformation and its impacts. The Roadmap reflects a recognition that national statistical systems need to adapt and expand to adequately reflect the digitalisation of our economies and societies, with disaggregated data providing an evidence base from which to identify where digital divides exist and those who are most at risk from the disruption technological change brings. It also highlights the need for new, complementary data infrastructures capable of monitoring digital activities and data flows on a timely basis wherever they happen. The ten actions are outlined below…(More)”.