Organising large scale community responses can be a messy and complicated task, but AI can help cut through this complexity to coordinate action. Civic AI is a research project exploring where AI can help equip communities with the tools to collectively respond to the climate crisis and achieve the 2050 target of a carbon-neutral economy. Developed by Dark Matter Labs and Lucidminds and supported by Nesta’s Centre for Collective Intelligence Design (CCID), it builds on CCID’s research that explores how novel forms of combining artificial intelligence and the collective intelligence of people can better address significant social challenges.

The Civic AI toolkit contains three “strategic blueprints” or visual guides that map out the different components (datasets, digital infrastructure, AI models, community contributions, etc) making up an open public service ecosystem and describe how the different parts interact.

Each blueprint explores a unique scenario where people and machines work collaboratively as part of a collective response to the climate crisis. Within the scenarios, AI is used as a tool to enhance a community’s collective intelligence, to help align actions, reduce associated costs, and advance the value of collaboration.

The three scenarios we address are:

Each blueprint covers five sections:

• (A) provides a visual summary of the C key stages and example interactions within each scenario.
• (B) gives a schematic overview of the processes conducted by people and machines in each of the scenarios.
• (C) details the key challenges E experienced by organisations working in these areas and a proposal for how they may be overcome.
• (D) provides details of how people (HI) and machines (AI) collaborate and the specific tasks carried out during each stage of the proposal.
• (E) summarises the civic assets which make up the proposal. These are either Tangible (physical) or Intangible (non-physical). Each component has an indicative Technology Readiness Level reflecting level of development of related technologies/projects. Components to achieve a Minimum Viable Product use case have also been highlighted.

75% of the effort will be directed towards integrating and deploying existing solutions and community engagement. The remaining focus should be on process innovation in order to create seamless experiences and wide adoption of existing AI techniques, applied in specific contexts.

Alongside the blueprint, you will find a summary of each use case and the challenges it tries to address, as well as some of the issues to be aware of with respect to AI ethics and data privacy.

The Civic AI toolkit was designed by Dark Matter Labs and Lucidminds based on their research for the CivicAI project, with advisory support from CCID.