Reducing AI Harms With Community-Led Governance and Collective Action

By Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Summary: Explores community-led governance models and collective action strategies for holding AI systems accountable.

Relevance: Fits the Surveillance & Civic Life subdomain: argues that AI accountability requires organized community power — cooperatives and collectives — rather than only regulatory or corporate self-governance, a model social workers doing community organizing or coalition work could apply directly.

Key findings: Frames concentrated, profit-driven AI development as a driver of information-system degradation, algorithmic prejudice, and labor exploitation, and points to cooperatives and collectives as vehicles for redistributing authority, citing examples such as community-run chatbots coordinating humanitarian disaster response and data tools used to address gender-based violence in Brazil. The piece stays at the level of principle rather than laying out a tested governance model.

Read the original: https://ssir.org/articles/entry/ai-building-community-governance