"Taking Stock at FAccT": Using Participatory Design to Co-Create a Vision for the Fairness, Accountability and Transparency Community

2026-04-17

AI Summary

This work proposes a novel community-oriented governance approach for the AI societal impact research community (e.g., FAccT) by introducing participatory design into this domain for the first time. Integrating in-person CRAFT workshops, asynchronous Polis opinion aggregation, and qualitative synthesis, the study develops a spatiotemporally scalable and cognitively diverse co-design paradigm. This method effectively incorporates voices from heterogeneous stakeholders, systematically uncovering areas of consensus, disagreement, and uncertainty on key issues within the community. The resulting grassroots-driven governance recommendations provide empirical support for FAccT leadership and establish a new pathway for community-centered governance in critical AI research.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Planning and Decision Support for Human-Machine Teams
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Societal Impact of AI

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness and ethical considerations in crowd work and in human-in-the-loop AI systems
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization
• Responsible Web: Algorithmic accountability and transparency on the web

Abstract

As a relatively new forum, ACM FAccT has become a key space for activists and scholars to critically examine emerging AI and ML technologies. It brings together academics, civil society members, and government representatives from diverse fields to explore the broader societal impacts of both deployed and proposed technologies. We report a large-scale participatory design (PD) process for reflexive conference governance, which combined an in-person CRAFT session, an asynchronous Polis poll and the synthesis of a governance-facing report for the FAccT leadership. Participants shaped the substantive agenda by authoring seed statements, adding new statements and making patterns of agreement, disagreement and uncertainty made visible through voting.Our endeavors represent one of the the first instances of applying PD to a venue that critically interrogates the societal impacts of AI, fostering a niche in which critical scholars are free to voice their concerns. Finally, this work advances large-scale PD theory by providing an effective case study of a co-design paradigm that can readily scale temporally and epistemologically.

Problem

• participatory design
• FAcCT
• AI governance
• conference governance
• societal impacts of AI

Innovation

• Participatory Design
• Reflexive Governance
• AI Ethics
• Co-Creation
• Polis