Contributing

Start here

Everyone can propose changes to this site—no permission needed.

Path	What to do
GitHub	Open the repository, edit a file, open a pull request.
Slack	Message `@Cursor` with the change you want (for example: add an event, fix a link, add your name).
Ask	Open an issue, post in Slack, or email hello@publicai.network.

Good first edits: typos, events on the homepage, publications, add yourself to the Contributors list below, or news.

Who is involved

The Public AI Network brings together a diverse coalition of researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and organizations, all advancing public AI. Our community spans academia, civil society, government, and industry, united by a shared vision of AI that serves the public good. Join us!

Contributors

Contributors to our collective work, from publications and advocacy to technical projects and events. This list is under construction - add yourself!

Albert Cañigueral

Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC)

Focus: Airbus for AI

2024

Alex Krasodomski

Chatham House, UK

Community Organizer
Focus: Digital public infrastructure, partnerships

Founding Member

Alexander Schneider

Colorado, USA

Focus: State capacity + AI alignment

2025

Alek Tarkowski

Open Future, EU

Community Organizer
Focus: • Digital commons advocacy, open licensing, data governance

2023

Antoine McGrath

Archive.org, SF

Focus: Open data, EOTArchive
Vision: Robust open base LLM for global public use

2024

Avani Wildani

Cloudflare, SF

Focus: Data pipelines, distributed systems

2023

B Cavello

Aspen Digital, DC

Community Organizer Focus: Benchmarks lead, Policy strategy, AI governance, public interest tech

Founding Member

Beatrice Murch

Internet Archive Europe

Focus: Cultural heritage preservation, libraries

2025

Benjamin de la Peña

Shared Use Mobility Center, Chicago

Focus: Transportation, informality in cities, systems change
Vision: Assistive Intelligence, not Artificial Intelligence

2024

Bettina Warburg

📚

Focus: Web3, strategic innovation, knowledge integrity

2024

Bobbi Rakova

Responsible AI, SF

Focus: Responsible AI, mechanism design

2024

Brandon Jackson

🎨

Focus: Whitepaper lead, product design, creative applications of AI

Founding Member

Catherine Geanuracos

Civic Tech, LA

Focus: Civic technology, speculative fiction

2024

Chad Kohalyk

Vancouver, BC

Focus: Future of computing, standards, governance
Vision: AI as DPI independent of corp/state interests

2024

Dave Buckley

OpenMined, UK

Focus: Data infrastructure, governed access to protected data

2025

David Pham

Simon Fraser University, Canada

Focus: Data economics, safety

2024

Diane Coyle

University of Cambridge, UK

Seminar: • Public policy for tech (summary)
Focus: Economics, digital policy

2024

MEMBERS A-D

Don Means

Gigabit Libraries Network, US

Focus: Libraries, digital infrastructure

2024

Eleanor Tursman

The Aspen Institute, US

Focus: Program development, tech policy, digital equity

2024

Ella Shoup

London, UK

Focus: AI ethics, policy, geopolitics

2024

Felix Sieker

Bertelsmann Foundation, Germany

Focus: Common good, social policy, innovation strategy

2024

Flynn Devine

Boundary Object Studio, US

Focus: Research, sociotechnical systems, participatory design

2023

Gideon Lichfield

Journalist

Seminar: • Past and future narratives for tech (summary)
• June 3, 2025
Focus: Tech journalism, narrative building

2024

Jacob Taylor

Brookings Institution, US

Focus: Collective intelligence, sustainable development

2024

Jake Hirsch-Allen

The Dais, Canada

Focus: Canadian policy, partnerships

2024

Jean Garcia Periche

Public Intelligence AI

Focus: DPI, agentic government, LATAM AI ecosystems

2025

Joseph Low

Product Design, Singapore

Focus: Product design

2024

Joshua Hewson

Brown, US

Focus: Alignment, cognitive enhancement, neuroscience

2024

Joshua Tan

Oxford, Metagov

Community Organizer
Focus: Computational governance, collective intelligence
Projects: Airbus for AI, Inference Utility, Public AI for Libraries

Founding Member

Nathan E. Sanders

Harvard Berkman Klein Center

Data Scientist
Focus: Civic technology, AI for democracy
Projects: Rewiring Democracy book, MAPLE

2023

Katherine Elkins

Interdisciplinary AI, US

Focus: Storytelling, interdisciplinary AI

2024

Katherine Gorman

🛜, US

Focus: Communications, alignment

2025

Larry Williams

UnionBase, DC

Focus: Labor and economics

2024

Lorelei Kelly

Smart Congress, DC

Focus: Democracy, government modernization

2024

Luca Cominassi

Parti Collective, Italy

Focus: Airbus for AI

2024

MEMBERS E-L

Magnus Sahlgren

AI Sweden

Seminar: • GPT-SW3 (summary)
• September 24, 2024
Focus: Swedish language model development

Season 2

Max Gahntz

Mozilla

Focus: AI policy

2025

Melissa Regan

Writer, SF

Focus: Speculative fiction

2024

Meredith Whipple

Public Knowledge, US

Focus: Policy, civic technology

2024

Mohsin Y. K. Yousufi

Georgia Tech

Focus: Public AI for Libraries, Civic Tech

2025

Natalie Buda Smith

Library of Congress, US

Focus: Libraries, government, humans in the loop. (interview)

2024

Nick Garcia

Public Knowledge, DC

Community Organizer
Focus: Policy advocacy, community governance digital rights, libraries

Founding Member

Nick Vincent

Simon Fraser University, Canada

Focus: Data contribution systems, platform cooperatives, labor, data flywheel

2024

Nicolas Flores-Herr

Fraunhofer, Germany

Focus: Conversational AI, training, neuroscience

2025

Oleg Lavrovsky

Datalets, Switzerland

Focus: Open source/data/hardware/AI/collaboration
Project: Swiss {ai} Weeks, Apertus

2025

Philip Tomei

AI Objectives Institute, UK

Focus: Art and AI, labor and societal impacts

2024

Renata Avila

France

Focus: Digital commons, standards, A2K, fundamental rights Project: Sustainable data commons

2025

Robert Gehorsam

LA/NYC

Focus: Democracy innovation, security, climate

2025

Sam Klein

Harvard Berkman Klein Center, Boston

Community Organizer Focus: Decentralized infrastructure, universal library,
Wiki AI

Founding Member

Sarah Mackenzie

Montreal

Focus: Arts technologies, AI ethics, data justice
Project: ARTIA Project

2025

Sarah Schwettmann

Transluce, MIT

Focus: Interpretability, third-party audits

2024

Thomas Renkert

PH Heidelberg, Germany

Focus: AI in education, AI sovereignty, educational equity
Project: ParzivAI (historic languages LLM)

2024

MEMBERS M-Z

Speakers & Collaborators

Speakers, collaborators, and sources of inspiration. Check out their work!

Aza Raskin

Center for Humane Technology, Earth Species Project, SF

Seminar: • The AI Dilemma (summary)
• October 8, 2024
Focus: Humane AI, attention economy

Season 2

Beth Noveck

GovLab, NEU, Chief AI Strategist for NJ

Speaker: Government innovation, AI strategy (LOC event)

Multiple events

Bruce Schneier

Harvard, Boston

Seminar: • Public options for AI (summary)
• January 9, 2024
Focus: Security, public interest technology

Season 1

Dan Zhao

MIT, Boston

Seminar: • Agent Strategy (notes)
• August 21, 2025
Focus: Multimodal agents, benchmarks

Season 3

David Bau

Northeastern, Boston

Seminar: • The National Deep Inference Fabric (summary)
• July 11, 2025
Focus: Neural network interpretability

Season 3

David Eaves

UCL, London

Seminar: • Lessons from digital public infrastructure (summary)
• February 20, 2024
Focus: Digital government, open data

Season 1

Divya Siddarth

Collective Intelligence Project, SF

Seminar: • Democratic AI (summary)
• September 17, 2024
Focus: Participatory governance, collective intelligence

Season 2

EM Lewis-Jong

Mozilla

Seminar: • Community data and Common Voice (summary)
• May 6, 2025
Focus: Common Voice dataset

Season 3

Ganesh Sitaraman

Vanderbilt, US

Seminar: • Industrial organization and antimonopoly (summary)
• February 13, 2024
Focus: Antitrust, constitutional law

Season 1

Irene Solaiman

HuggingFace

Seminar: • The role of openness in AI (summary)
• September 10, 2024
Focus: AI safety, responsible release

Season 2

SPEAKERS A-I

Jeni Tennison

Connected by Data

Seminar: • Community power in AI (summary)
• October 1, 2024
Focus: Data governance, collective consent

Season 2

Julia Angwin

New York Times / Harvard

Seminar: • The politics of AI (summary)
• February 6, 2024
Focus: Algorithmic accountability journalism

Season 1

Julia Lane

NYU Wagner School

Seminar: • AI and the labor market (summary)
• Library of Congress Speaker
Focus: Data science, labor economics

Multiple Events

Katie Antypas

National Science Foundation

Seminar: • Public compute (summary)
• AI in the Agencies Panel - LoC
Focus: Research computing infrastructure

Multiple Events

Kim Stanley Robinson

Author

Seminar: • The near possible future of AI (summary)
• June 10, 2025
Notable: Science fiction, climate futures

Season 3

Lawrence Lessig

Harvard Law School

Seminar: • AI and democracy (summary)
• Library of Congress: Why This is the Moment for Public AI
Focus: Democracy, regulation, institutional corruption

Multiple Events

Leslie Teo

AI Singapore

Seminar: • SEA-LION (summary)
• August 27, 2024
Focus: Southeast Asian language models

Season 2

Martin Tisné

AI Collaborative, Current AI, Omidyar

Seminar: • Public interest AI (summary)
• May 20, 2025
Focus: Data rights, philanthropy

Season 3

Mat Dryhurst

Artist

Seminar: • Do Not Train (summary)
• April 22, 2025
Focus: Spawning AI, artist rights

Season 3

SPEAKERS J-M

Nicole DeCario

Allen Institute (AI2)

Seminar: • Public compute (summary)
• August 20, 2024
Focus: AI2 compute infrastructure

Season 2

Reema Selhi

DACS, British Copyright Council

Seminar: • AI and copyright (summary)
• April 22, 2025
Focus: Copyright law, artist rights

Season 3

Rick Stevens

Argonne National Labs

Seminar: • Case study: AuroraGPT (summary)
• January 23, 2024
Focus: Science-focused language models

Season 1

Sarah Myers West

AI Now

Seminar: • AI Nationalisms (summary)
• October 15, 2024
Focus: AI policy, geopolitics

Season 2

Ted Chiang

Author

Seminar: • Generative AI is not useful for making art
• April 29, 2025
Notable: Science fiction, AI criticism

Season 3

Taylor Jo Isenberg

Economic Security Project

Seminar: • A Vision for Public AI in California (summary)
• May 13, 2025
Focus: Economic policy, public options

Season 3

Yoshua Bengio

MILA, LawZero

Seminar: • Towards a network of publicly-funded AI labs (summary)
• August 13, 2024
Focus: AI safety advocacy, LawZero

Season 2

SPEAKERS N-Z

Other facilitators and speakers at past Public AI events include:

AI in the Agencies panel, Library of Congress, 2024-08-11: Travis Hoppe (AI R&D, White House OSTP), Victoria Houed (AI Policy, Commerce; now at POPVOX), Zach Whitman (Chief AI Officer, GSA). Carolyn Dee (NY State AI policy) gave a presentation about the state of Empire AI.
Public AI Congress, Paris, 2025-02-11: Adriana Groh, Sovereign Tech Agency (Germany); Alexander Ilic, ETH AI Center (Switzerland); Marta Villegas, BSC (Spain); Petri Myllymäki, Ellis Institute (Finland)
AI Action II, Fey, 2025-02-12/13: Brewster Kahle (Internet Archive), Peter Wang (Anaconda), Primavera De Filippi (Alien), Pedro Ortiz Suarez (Common Crawl), Vincent Ginis (VUB)

Supporting Organizations

We gratefully acknowledge operational support and collaboration from:

CS&S

BKC

PMF

LoC

Metagov · Aspen Digital · Public Knowledge · Chatham House
Code for Science and Society · Berkman Klein Center · Rockefeller Foundation
Mozilla Foundation · Patrick J. McGovern Foundation · Siegel Family Endowment · Open Future
Internet Archive · Library of Congress · Bertelsmann Foundation · Creative Commons

Join the Movement

We are always looking for people and organizations committed to ensuring AI serves the public good. Whether you’re a researcher, policymaker, technologist, or advocate, there’s a place for you in our community.

We host a Slack for active community members and partners, and host regular events including a seminar series to share insights from and foster discussion with leaders in various fields.

Get Involved Subscribe

FAQ

GitHub vocabulary (PR, fork, merge, …)

- **Pull request (PR):** A proposed change. Someone reviews it and merges it to publish. - **Repository (repo):** The project folder on GitHub. - **Fork:** Your copy of the repo to edit safely. - **Branch / commit / merge:** Draft line of work, saved snapshot, and combining changes. - **Markdown:** The simple format we use in `.md` files; **Jekyll** builds the site from them. Not comfortable with Git? Describe what you want in Slack or email and someone can help.

Why contribute?

This site is a public resource for the movement to build **AI as public infrastructure**. Contributions keep information accurate, share knowledge, and make resources easier to find.

What happens after I open a PR?

1. Automated checks run when configured. 2. Someone with access reviews your change. 3. You may get questions or small edit requests. 4. When it’s approved, it’s merged and goes live. Typical review time: **about 1–3 days**. Larger changes (new features, design) are easier if you discuss in an issue or Slack first.

Site structure (for editors)

- **Jekyll** static site; content is mostly **Markdown** (`.md`) in the repo root and subfolders. - **Navigation** is listed in `_config.yml` under `minima.nav_pages`. - **Styles:** `assets/css/style.scss` and `_sass/`.

Examples: what to edit

- **Add yourself to the list below:** edit this file (`contributing.md`), find the right alphabetical section in the contributor cards, copy an existing card’s format, and open a PR. - **Add an event:** edit `index.md` and add a row under **Upcoming events**. - **Typo:** edit the relevant `.md` file; small fixes can be done in the GitHub web UI.

Slack: quick approvals

For urgent fixes, you can ping maintainers in Slack with your PR or request. People who have often helped with reviews include Joshua Tan, Sam Klein, Nick Garcia, B Cavello, and Brandon Jackson (see Slack for `@` handles).

Content guidelines

- **Accuracy:** Prefer sourced, verifiable information. - **Tone:** Welcoming and professional. - **Relevance:** Aligned with public AI and this coalition. - **Conduct:** Be respectful, assume good intent, welcome newcomers.

Need help?

- Slack: `#general` or `#website` (if your workspace uses them). - Email: [hello@publicai.network](mailto:hello@publicai.network) - GitHub: [How to create a pull request](https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests)