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Initiative

Transformation Community AI Project

A practice-grounded, plural, and non-extractive learning initiative that convenes an AI Expert Council to shape ethical, real-world AI practice in sustainability transformations.

Digital Stewardship Knowledge Commons Relational Infrastructure
Status
Active
Timeline
Oct 2025 - Oct 2026
Lead Partner
Transformations Community
Structure
Advisory Group (7-10) + Expert Council (70-100)

The Challenge

Beyond Tool-Driven Approaches

The field of AI in sustainability transformations is moving fast, but the dominant pattern is often tool-driven. Lists of tools and capabilities are plentiful, yet practitioners repeatedly face a deeper need:

  • Trusted guidance for how to apply AI in complex, real-world workflows
  • Practical wisdom, not just information
  • Accountability mechanisms that resist elite capture and epistemic homogeneity
  • Ways to surface tensions and blind spots without collapsing into false consensus

The Response

An Expert Council for Structured Disagreement

This project establishes an AI Expert Council as a long-term, plural network designed to foster structured disagreement. The intent is not consensus. The intent is a braver space where critique is a core function and where diverse ways of knowing can coexist.

The model uses a dual-satellite governance structure:

  • Project Core: research, synthesis, and coordination
  • Inner orbit (Advisory Group, 7-10): higher-touch guidance, early draft review, and hands-on design trade-offs
  • Outer orbit (Expert Council, 70-100): broad field-weaving, critique, and surfacing tensions across the ecosystem

Design Principles

What Anchors the Council

  • Plural and contested: disagreement is a feature, not a bug
  • Practice-grounded: at least half the council holds deep engagement with real projects and communities
  • Epistemically plural: Western academic expertise sits alongside Indigenous knowledges, Majority World perspectives, feminist and decolonial frameworks, and organizing traditions
  • Decentralized and non-extractive: members act as distributed nodes who gain value and influence through participation, not as a labour pool

Wisdom Sources

Where the Insights Come From

The work draws insights from three sources, intentionally held in tension:

  • Design research: grounded insights from practitioners (interviews, community workshops, prompt chains, diaries)
  • Literature review: situated within established academic and practitioner fields, including hybrid and augmented collective intelligence and AI in sustainability transformations
  • Plural governance: outside-in challenge and guidance through the dual-orbit structure

Success Looks Like

What We're Working Toward

  • A credible, field-relevant pattern language that practitioners actually use
  • Clearer ethical guardrails that are grounded in practice rather than abstract principle
  • A strengthened ecosystem with more honest sensemaking, better referrals, and fewer blind spots
  • A living network that can outlast the initial cycle and continue shaping the field

Our Role

Adjacent Practice

Sustainable Impact Foundation is adjacent to this work through aligned practice in hybrid intelligence, ethical AI stewardship, and knowledge mobilization. We contribute through systems framing, field-weaving, and supporting the translation from contested insight into usable practice.

Related Focus Areas

Connected themes

01

Digital Stewardship

Building digital infrastructure that serves communities rather than extracting from them.

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04

Knowledge Commons

Translating collective insight into action across domains and communities.

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Interested in this work?

If you are working in AI ethics, sustainability transformations, or collective intelligence, we welcome conversations about shared learning and collaboration.

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