PROGRAMME 4

Communications and Engagement

The Scottish AI Alliance 

Recruitment for the Scottish AI Alliance’s Leadership Circle was launched at the same time as the strategy on 22 March 2021. The membership of the Leadership Circle was announced on 7 June 2021 to coincide with the first meeting of the group. The group has agreed to meet quarterly.  

The Support Circle of the Scottish AI Alliance provides the executive function and was established as a partnership between The Data Lab (Scotland’s Innovation Centre for Data and AI) and the AI policy team within the Scottish Government’s Digital Directorate. Recruitment for staffing resource in The Data Lab was launched in May 2021 with the new team starting in August 2021 including a Communications and Events Officer, Project Manager and Administrative Support Officer to support the Head of the Scottish AI Alliance Support Circle. 

The Delivery and Community Circles have evolved into an interested group of critical friends for the Alliance. In November 2021, they were onboarded to The Data Lab’s Online Community (more below) to enable two-way interaction with the interested members. Input from the groups was sought with regards to the Playbook. Going forward, we will work to better leverage input from these interested members of the AI community whilst recognising that more significant pieces of work will be commissioned through formal tender processes with appropriate compensation.  

As we go forward into Year 2 and expand our activity, we will be commissioning work from collaborative task forces to ensure that we have groups of the appropriate expertise to deliver desired outputs. Interested members of the Delivery and Community Circles are welcome to submit proposals for these tenders. 

Engagement and participatory mechanism 

Efforts to develop an effective mechanism to ensure civil society’s full participation began in July 2021 with a workshop bringing together a range of civil society organisations. Three key themes emerged from this workshop: 

• preparing the ground 

• engaging with civil society organisations 

• engaging with citizens 

This workshop has led to the Alliance thinking about engagement and participation holistically and that there is no one single mechanism for engagement or participation that will address the needs of the three themes above.  

The “mechanism” in essence will consist of many different moving parts with distinct outward (communications, events, public engagement etc) and inward (citizen panels, workshops, deliberative engagement, surveys etc) workstreams.  

In terms of the outward workstream, the Alliance has set up a wide range of communications channels (website, podcasts, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook) with growing audiences across the board. More on the communications programme can be found below.  

For the inward workstream, the Alliance were keen to get an understanding of best practices in engaging society in the delivery of a government strategy. An invitation to quote for organisations to undertake this review in November 2021 with the work awarded to the Democratic Society in December 2021. The report from this review was delivered at the end of February 2022 and its key findings (and the report itself) can be read in the blog from the Democratic Society.  

The exact shape of the next steps following this review is still to be determined but the Alliance are planning to commission some work to develop design principles and for it to be co-designed with civil society. Once these principles are established, a rolling scenario-based programme of engagement will follow and will involve organisations relevant to the scenario.  

Engagement is general is also tied into the work with Saidot in the CivTech challenge (in Programme 8) around trust and agency in the use of AI in the public sector, and also the upcoming programme involving children with the Children’s Parliament and The Alan Turing Institute in Programme 9. 

The Scottish AI Playbook will also play a part in engagement as we will ensure that it points to quality resources (in addition to our Demystifying AI MOOC – more below) that are already available to help people increase their understanding of AI.  

Discussions are also underway with The New Real and Experiential AI initiatives to collaborate on an artistic commission in Year 2 with the view of a launch at the world-renowned Edinburgh International Festival in Summer 2023. 

Communications 

As mentioned above, the Scottish AI Alliance has established a range of communications channels to reach out to stakeholders and the general public, guided by an External Communications Strategy placing people at the centre of all communication.  

On the launch of the Strategy, the website created during the Strategy’s development process pivoted to be a communications hub for the progress of the Scottish AI Alliance in the delivery of the Strategy as well as for AI activity across Scotland more widely. The website features news, blogs, events, AI resources and job listings in the field.  

The Scotland’s AI Strategy e-newsletter was established and gained over 1000 subscribers in the first year.  

Turing’s Triple Helix, the podcast channel for Scotland’s AI Strategy, was launched in July 2021 in order to feature guests from Scotland and the wider international sphere and explore topics relating to artificial intelligence in an easily digestible way. In the first year there were 15 episodes of the podcast distributed across five podcast platforms: Amazon Music, Podbean, Spotify, Apple Podcast and the CogX app.  

Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts were launched and by the end of the first year had a combined following of over 4,400.

A key communications undertaking in year 1 was the organising of the inaugural Scottish AI Summit on 30 March 2022. Held in a hybrid format (online and in person in Edinburgh) the event features 62 speakers, panellists and facilitators representing industry, academia, public and third sector from across Scotland and beyond in an agenda combining keynotes and content submitted by Scotland's AI community. The Summit is an opportunity for the over 700 delegates to hear from leading AI experts from Scotland and beyond and get involved in a wide range of discussions and workshops. The Summit will be an annual event and it is planned to be hosted in a different city each year (Glasgow for 2023).   

In addition to the communications programme, the Alliance team are also developing a public engagement MOOC on Demystifying AI that will be launched in Autumn 2022. This MOOC will be working with several key partners to deliver a unique offering focusing on how AI impacts people’s everyday lives as well as debunking myths around AI.   

The Data Lab Online Community 

In keeping with the Strategy approach of open and transparent processes in which as many opportunities as possible will be provided for everyone to contribute, it is a key Strategy action to engage the wider community in participating and collaborating with the Strategy in order to encourage the adoption and engagement with AI. In order to leverage the engagement resources we already have available to us, we will engage The Data Lab’s (TDL) online Community to encourage collaboration and contributions from the community. 
 
The TDL Community was launched in October 2021 to enable data and AI professionals, students and enthusiasts to connect, collaborate, learn and grow. It is a free platform which currently hosts over 1,000 individual members from the tech, data and AI ecosystems across the globe. 

We have identified the TDL Community as a unique opportunity to directly engage the data and AI community in delivering the Strategy actions. As well as hosting groups for the Delivery and Community Circles, who have been engaged in developing the Scottish AI Playbook directly through The Data Lab Community, we have also planned for ongoing Community engagement to feed into the Scottish AI Playbook on an ongoing basis. This will be done primarily by identifying and engaging with high volume and influential Community users, liaising with these users directly in order to encourage diverse activity on the Community. This will be supplemented by a planned campaign of engagement activities including opportunities to interact with the Leadership and Support Circles, key players in the AI ecosystem, and with each other on a less formal basis. We will seek input, opinions and feedback from the Community, as well as engaging them in testing phases of key Strategy outputs. 

We hope that by capitalising on the growing interest and membership of TDL Community we will be able to build a vibrant, engaged and collaborative community of AI professionals and enthusiasts to help build on the continued work of the Strategy. 

 Strategic alignment 

Since spring 2021, officials leading on the delivery of the AI Strategy, Scotland’s Digital Strategy and the Scottish Technology Ecosystem Review (STER) have met regularly to discuss how work across the different programmes can be best aligned, and to identify opportunities for collaboration. 

This approach is delivering results, helping to strengthen working relationships amongst those working on the programmes, and expanding to include colleagues responsible for others, including beyond Scottish Government. 

In late 2021, the senior leads for each programme took part in a podcast discussion of how work to deliver the AI and Digital Strategies and the STER recommendations will be aligned; https://www.scotlandaistrategy.com/news/new-podcast-scotland-a-digital-nation.

These regular discussions have evolved over time to include officials working on other programmes, such as digital economy, Scotland: a trading nation and Scotland's Vision for Trade. There is also dialogue with those working on cyber resilience and security, digital ethics, fair work, skills development and many other initiatives.

 International engagement 

The Strategy sets out our ambitions for Scotland to play a bigger role on the global AI stage, and we have made a promising start on this across two strands of activity.  The first has focussed on building on the momentum and interest generated by the launch of Scotland’s AI Strategy in 2021.  Forming part of our wider communications and engagement plan, we have engaged in a number of high profile events, media activity and podcasts in the UK, Europe, Asia and the US.  A major highlight was our facilitating a virtual ‘Getting AI Right For Every Child’ roundtable described below. 

These engagements have created a platform for more in-depth bilateral engagement, a particular feature of which has been sharing of perspectives with Nordic and northern nations of Europe that share our values-based approach to adoption of AI.  They have also informed the development of our strategic plan for international engagement, which we started to take forward in late 2021 and which will continue to be shaped and delivered through collaboration.  A working group to lead on this and take the plan forward will be convened in spring 2022.  

We also continue to liaise with counterparts in the UK Government’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, Office for AI and the AI Council, as part of the delivery of the Strategy. Alongside this engagement we have been working with the Cabinet Office to pilot the UK Government Algorithmic Transparency Standard – more on this below – and, in related work, with the Alan Turing Institute and British Standards Institute on the new AI Standards Hub.  

There has also been dialogue with the Open Community for Ethics in Autonomous and Intelligent Systems and officials supporting work on AI in Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, Malta and Finland. Reflecting just how far afield news of the Strategy has travelled, in November 2021 we were delighted to be interviewed by Forbes magazine for a feature article discussing Scotland’s potential in AI.