Participation, Engagement & Outreach

Children & Young People 

The partnership project with Children’s Parliament and The Alan Turing Institute continues as a collaborative programme of work engaging children with AI.  

Stage 1 of the project explored Children’s Rights and AI, culminating in the children who are taking part in the project taking the stage as a plenary panel as part of the Scottish AI Summit 2023 in Glasgow. The panel, ‘Exploring Children’s Rights & AI: Breaking News!’, featured the Members of Children’s Parliament (MCPs) sharing what they have learnt from the first stage of the project, with insights into their views, thoughts, and findings around AI.  

From April 2023 to March 2024, the MCPs participated in Stage 2 of the project, where they dug deeper into their investigations around AI by working with organisations developing AI policies and products.  These investigations were built around themes decided by the MCPs in Stage 1: 

• Privacy & Security 

• Fairness & Bias 

• Learning About AI 

• AI in Education 

For each theme, one of the participation schools worked with an AI partner and a creative partner to input on the development of an AI policy or product, and then reflect on it creatively.  

In Glasgow, the MCPs worked with Digital Skills Education on issues around Privacy & Security, with creative output facilitated by visual artist Zeo.  

In Doune, the MCPs worked with NHS Scotland’s West of Scotland Innovation Hub to explore fairness in bias within an AI system being deployed within a health setting, with creative output facilitated by sound artist Eye Suriyanon.  

In Edinburgh, the MCPs worked with the University of Edinburgh’s Moray House School of Education to investigate how AI might impact education, with the opportunity to input on the development of an AI-powered maths learning app. Their creative response to the impact of AI on education was facilitated by the interdisciplinary social enterprise The Science Ceilidh.  

 In Shetland, the MCPs worked with Silicon Croft and The Alan Turing Institute to find out more about how we could learn about AI, and what it means for Island Communities. Their creative response was facilitated by local printmaking artist Jono Sandilands.  

The children took centre stage at the Scottish AI Summit 2024, and an exhibition of their artworks from the project featured at the event.  

Stage 3 of the project continues in 2024, where the programme will pivot to work towards mainstreaming the insights and findings from the initial phases.   

  
Communities  

Building on our work from 2022/2023 to establish engagement principles, we established a process of communities engagement across 2023/2024 and beyond. 

We started by actively listening to communities and organizations through our 'Communities Call Out’. This phase of our engagement, participation and outreach is designed to build relationships with groups who would like to find out more about AI and Scotland’s AI Strategy.  

Through these relationships we are working to discover what “trustworthy, ethical and inclusive AI” means to the people of Scotland and the ways in which they would most like to engage with Scotland’s AI Strategy through a suite of engagement sessions that build AI knowledge, demystify AI and seek to explore and platform the perspective of different communities.  

Through these relationships we were part of Ada Scotland’s first Inverness Ada.Scot Festival, YouthLink Scotland’s Digital Youth Work Conference and tsiMoray’s Join the Dots Festival. We have delivered sessions with the Scottish Climate Communities Action Network on the intersection of the climate crisis and AI, with Generations Working Together on intergenerational approaches to AI, and with intuUniversity Govan on AI as an aspect of employability, amongst others. 

We have built particularly strong relationships within healthcare communities through this process. Several engagement events with the Health & Social Care ALLIANCE have led to a foundation being built through which we are exploring how to embed human rights within health and social care settings with their Digital Citizens Panel. 

In the year ahead, as we move from the relationship-building and listening stage of our engagement process, we will be harnessing these relationships to create a participatory function for the Scottish AI Alliance where the people of Scotland can feed into and influence decisions around AI. 

This will involve both internal and external efforts to establish understanding and mechanisms for ongoing dialogue about AI's impact on Scottish society, reducing uncertainty.