Solidarity, ai-note taker tools, and etiquette

Welcome to newsletter six. This one’s a summary of an AI note-taker etiquette session held last month. It was supposed to be about more, but I’m deferring to the idea of quickness instead.

Newsletter seven will be about music, culture, and democracy (ish), including reference to The Rite of Spring and noise music. Newsletter eight will be about creating AI use guidelines at your organization, informed by notes from the field. You can sign up here for future newsletters if you’re reading this some other way: https://time-and-space-studios.ghost.io/

Back to Quickness

I’m having a good time thinking with Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millenium. His first suggestion is to write with lightness. His second is to understand the value of quickness in writing, which he explores in the context of fable and oral story. A story that can be told quickly, in sparse terms, is also repeatable. There’s timeliness to this thinking, given the challenge of asking people to add friction to their lives when they’re exhausted already. Overly long anything is tiring.

In oral storytelling, the action moves fast. The plot moves with minimal description, detail, or backstory. This makes the stories short, and most importantly, memorable. This is important for repetition, creating stories that can be easily told and retold. As Calvino writes: “The technique of oral narration in the popular tradition follows functional criteria. It leaves out unnecessary details but stresses repetition.” In the context of organizing, education, and working with others, sorting out new norms, making our efforts shorter, easier, repeatable – all seem worthwhile efforts.

The thinking behind the AI note-taker etiquette event held online in May was to do something short, not heavily planned, and informal. The event started at 15 minutes past the hour and ended seven minutes to the next one to help buffer the time a bit, inventing space around the session, creating a small pause to collect ourselves before moving onto the next thing. Realizing that our presence, our energy, and our attention impact others was part of it. Also creating small awareness that we can make meetings any length of time that we want to.

As a facilitator, I’m trained to start and end meetings on time. I also use timers that beep when my time is up when I speak in a group. Much of this is born out of an understanding of respect for other people’s time. Which is also why I so enjoy Francesca Polletta’s book, titled “Freedom is An Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements”.  Context is the difference.  When to hold tight and when to let loose on time.

Etiquette? Administrative Hacking?

The idea of etiquette, despite its intensive baggage, is a rhetorical device that could be understood as part of a counter to neoliberalism. A small-scale operational approach to solidarity and collectiveness.  What do these ideas look like in micro-increments? Sometimes they look like etiquette.

In a time of hyper-convenience, individualization, and near ubiquitous surveillance, often through self-surveillance, etiquette offers a framework of thinking that reinforces the reality of our interconnectedness. Every time you make a decision about your behaviour, you impact others, no matter how small. It’s an expression of understanding that there is no such thing as an individual, no matter how deeply the idea has been installed in mainstream western culture. This idea is explored in Judith Butler’s 2020 book The Force of Non-Violence.  In the specific context of data and technology, Jasmine McNealy explores the concept in her 2022 paper An Ecological Approach to Data Governance.

Five suggestions regarding the use of AI-notetaker tools:

1.      Don’t default to surveillance. The use of AI note-taker tools is something that should be explicitly thought about, and consented to. The issue is not only of reducing surveillance, but also recognizing that using these tools creates new dependencies on technology companies. If new norms are created that every meeting has a transcript, even if no one uses it, that creates data to be stored, hosted, and ultimately paid for. Create a light-weight consent protocol, just to get off the ground: 1. Does this meeting really need to be recorded? 2. If yes, who needs to agree to it (everyone)? 3. How am I going to get that agreement, in a way that is informed? 4. What am I doing with the transcript afterward? (this should be part of consent gathering). Related reading on this topic: Decomputation  

2.      Consider high-trust vs. low-trust environments.  Leaders and managers need to know that it can be difficult if not impossible for staff to request that meetings aren’t recorded. If you’re a leader that values candor, space to make mistakes, and honesty, be aware that you may be putting a chill on your meetings by insisting on recordings. In some cases, if trust is high, it’s a small group, sure – if the notes might help. Also, in public settings or large groups, it’s safe to assume that someone is recording, even if you are not. Be mindful about this. And talk about it. 

3.      Accessibility creates productive friction in the context of surveillance. Sometimes creating a transcript is the best way to make sure people can be included. Use close captioning when you’re able. Find ways to talk about the trade-offs and benefits of using transcription tools, as well as alternatives to recording, in the context of accessibility. One of the biggest lessons in disability justice efforts isn’t to be perfect, but to start working on it consistently, and talking about it more. You will learn a lot. One thing I remember from a colleague in my civic tech community was how important it was to pay attention to audio quality, that great video but bad audio was really challenging and made it near impossible for some people to take part in an online event.   

4.      Synthesize rather than provide transcripts.  Some of the most beneficial effort you can put into collaborative work is doing the thinking of what is and isn’t useful to share from a meeting. So much of what is said never needs to be written down. Making people sift through transcripts or rely on the accuracy of computer-synthesis is a place where power is lost. Presence is an open question here here, sometime you can add more of it when not note-taking, sometimes note-taking creates focus. It's context dependent. Taking notes and sharing summaries is power. Note-taking is a tool for knowledge-development and communication, for responsibility and authority. For creating a sense within your body of the ideas you are defending, if it comes to that. Be intentional with where and why you stop doing this work. Related reading: on the importance of summation to relationships and representation.

5.      Kick note-taking bots out of meetings. If you’re hosting a meeting, your priority is your attendees. If someone has sent a transcription bot to a meeting without notifying you, you should not allow that transcription to happen. You can tell people in advance not to send these types of recorders, or you can make sure that if someone is sending one, you have consent from the group to have that record created and shared, including knowing what that recording is being used for. These are your jobs. And as Priya Parker wrote in the book, The Art of Gathering – “let purpose be your bouncer”.

Two great questions came up at the end of the session. Both had the same shape of a problem and a solution – what are we to do in cases where some people really value, benefit from, and appreciate using tools that are surveillant of others while other people don’t? The answer is to talk about it. And this answer is exactly where we can see issues related to pluralism and democracy – there isn’t a right or wrong answer, there is only context: trade-offs or conditions that we can put in place to support consensual use of technologies.

Ursula Franklin was a big fan of the process called scrupling, which is a practice of the Quakers. It’s basically the act of talking about a problem. Even if you don’t know what to do about an issue, there is value in talking about it, regardless of whether or not you arrive at a solution. Some of the work of this political moment is slowing down for long enough to realize the impacts we have on each other within our technology decisions, and to listen to each other more before charging ahead with what to do, a constant refrain that occurs in the circles of disability justice work. For longer thinking about the work of not taking action, see Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira.

One of the challenging but beneficial ways to approach this issue is to remember that another person’s use of a technology that impacts you may have nothing to do with any nefarious or malicious intent, and that this is still not grounds for you to have to be ok with it.  We need to remember that we do have immense power to reform and reshape the small-scale uses or refusals of technology, through social norms and etiquette, neither of which require regulation or any other government intervention. This begins with an awareness and greater comfort with talking to each other about what kind of cultures we want to live in, which is also why holding the topic with more lightness helps get us there.

Links from the session:

Interregnum by Nick Fox-Gieg. A story of the first hacker in WW2, a fascinating short film.

Lessons from using AI scribe tools, by Ben Gooch.  A cautionary tale about the use of transcription tools over time, in the context of medical practice, from a general practitioner.

Discuss. Decide. Do.  By Nicole Swerhun and Vanessa Av Ruskin: A decision-support tool. A free resource that outlines tested and repeatable methods to organize public engagement processes, some of which are super transferrable to other types of collaborative work and decision-making.

Only (dis)connect: Facing the intertwined (in)security of self, systems and society. By David Murakami Wood. A great short summary piece about the need to consider how to reduce and minimize digital dependencies.

Other bits and pieces:

I'll be in Winnipeg on June 18th as part of the Canadian Internet Regulation Authority's event Advancing the conversation on digital sovereignty at Canadians Connected: Winnipeg. Please join us and/or wave at me if we should say hi to each other when I'm in town :)

UKAI Projects had announced its Digital Bridges | Hybrid Program. From the site: "Most online collaboration still runs through platforms. Your work lives on someone else's server, your connection depends on their uptime, and the terms of your creative relationship are set by a company with different priorities than yours. Digital Bridges teaches a different approach." The program runs in July, and space is limited. It will be excellent.

Here’s the replay of a webinar hosted by the Shared-Use Mobility Center called Boring Tiny Tools for Transit, a.k.a. Just Enough AI. We talked about AI in context of cities, public administration, transportation etc. Boyd Reid talked about his company Hop In Technologies, using tech for organizing shared mobility, an approach that really works from problem first, tech second. Kevin Chambers talked about his work at his firm Full Path to support municipal governments in using technology well and also thinking about the smallest increments of experimentation that open up new ways of working. I’m in there talking broadly about procurement, cities, and culture regarding technology use. Big thanks to Benjamin de la Peña and Hannah Wilson for getting this together and hosting us. You can find out more about Share-Use Mobility Center’s work here, and by subscribing to their newsletter.