Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Oliver Escobar and Stephen Elstub: “Democratic wellbeing means people having voice and choice over decisions that affect their lives. Strengthening parliamentary democracy is essential for improving democratic wellbeing in the UK. This paper supports current efforts to enhance the UK’s four parliaments through deeper public engagement and citizen deliberation. Building a stronger working relationship between parliamentarians and citizens can increase institutional capacity to address the challenges of our time.

Parliaments are expected to navigate complex, long-term and often contentious policy challenges, while maintaining public trust and demonstrating responsiveness to citizens. Yet existing mechanisms for engaging the public in parliamentary policymaking – consultations, surveys, lobbying – often struggle to provide the kind of considered public judgement these challenges require

Why mini-publics?

We focus on mini-publics because they provide a robust and practical way to embed citizen deliberation in legislatures. Mini-publics are civic forums in which a diverse cross-section of the public participates in evidence-based deliberation to inform decision-making. Participants are selected through civic lottery to reflect the wider population and supported with resources to reduce barriers to participation…(More)”.

Book by Keith McCandless and Nancy White: “Liberating Structures (LS) are simple patterns that make it possible for individuals and groups to work together brilliantly. With a menu of 43+ open-source patterns, LS shift how people meet, plan, decide, and relate to one another, making it possible to include and engage many voices in shaping next steps and the future. LS Their minimal set of structural constraints to set groups free from conventional patterns that exclude, stifle, and over-control (like endless presentations, managed discussions, or unfocused brainstorming)…What’s New: Inside the Fieldbook

Sparkling New Visuals: Every structure features a sharp visual format and simple line drawings, making the microstructures and templates easy to follow, adapt, and share.

Expanded Repertoire: The LS menu has grown to 43 methods, introducing ten new, second-generation Liberating Structures to tackle modern challenges.

Integrated Online Practice: No more fragmented guides. Practical, field-tested instructions for both online and face-to-face facilitation are now embedded directly within every single structure.

Inclusive Design & Continuity: Learn how to co-design with your group. Master the art of composing strings, using short punctuations, and tracking multi-session progress with your participants, lifting off precisely where you left off.

The Deeper Why: We shine a brighter light on the 10 LS Principles and the complexity science concepts that underpin the repertoire—helping you bridge the gap between your espoused values and routine habits…(More)”

Article by Tony Oweke: “The United Nations’ Global Dialogue on AI Governance—born out of the 2024 Global Digital Compact (GDC) and parallel UN negotiations that also produced an Independent International Scientific Panel on AI—will convene this July in Geneva. The Dialogue arrives amid a broader proliferation: a growing ecosystem of international AI summits, including in Bletchley Park, Seoul, Paris, and New Delhi, that are attempting to shape the global governance landscape. Whether these attempts are coalescing into something coherent, however, remains to be seen.

The 2023 Bletchley Declaration generated a shared international vocabulary around frontier-AI risk and established AI safety as a matter for coordinated global action. It also catalyzed the AI Safety Institute to publish an evaluation of advanced AI systems’ capabilities and risks in its annual report. The highlight of the 2024 summit in Seoul was a commitment to establish a network of AI safety institutes spanning ten countries and the European Union (EU). The 2025 summit in Paris marked a shift away from safety and toward investment and adoption, underlined by several funding pledges and deals. India’s 2026 summit, by contrast, sought to center voices from the Global South in AI governance. And early indications are that the 2027 summit in Switzerland will again focus on safety and security.

Taken together, these summits have succeeded in mobilizing political attention and resources, but they have struggled to translate high-level commitments into coordinated, durable governance outcomes…(More)”.

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)”.