Thread by @ellenbroad

Last week I travelled to Adelaide for events with @AICollaborative and @TheAIML, organised by @yolandasamy, @nlothian and @MsAliAnderson. I left buzzing with energy and full of thoughts about community engagement in Oz (thread).

@AICollaborative are based in Adelaide. For my overseas tweeps, Adelaide is on the coast kind of halfway across Australia - 3.5 hours by plane from Perth (on the west side) and 2hrs by plane from Sydney (east side).

I want to emphasise the planes because something I noticed coming back to Oz is that overseas consultants/orgs often fail to conceptualise how spread out Australia is. This has big implications for projects requiring community engagement.

None of the major cities are connected by fast/regular trains. There are multiple time zones, plane travel is expensive, and there is no one major city that's a clear "hub" for the tech industry. There are people and orgs doing amazing stuff everywhere.

This means people tasked with community engagement (e.g. fed . gov consultations) often end up embarking on roadshows (flyshows) to cities around Oz, for in person round tables, typically once per project. There are always cities that miss out. They can be badly signposted.

And we talk a lot about harnessing tech to engage communities across the country but usually that means either a survey or a YouTube video or a live stream.

What I loved about @AICollaborative's event is it connected with communities online, *as well as* making use of physical communities in other cities. They partnered with a bunch of orgs: @LotFourteen @PawseyCentre @responsible_ai, Women in ML and Data Science, Enterprize...

There was a packed out room in Adelaide, a livestream, and livestreams to groups of people coming together in Hobart, Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne and Perth. That is every major city except Darwin (and I know @yolandasamy tried).

The vibe in Adelaide was warm, friendly, open. They had a code of conduct! They had a diversity and inclusion statement. A team of amazing volunteers from gov, industry, startups (who I dare not list here because I'll forget someone, so @yolandasamy and @nlothian can add them).

There were no egos, no eye-rolling. Just eagerness to learn some things from each other and talk about hard AI problems. @nlothian was running around keeping the livestream going, monitoring online questions, trying to keep it as inclusive for other cities as possible.

Basically @AICollaborative are doing exactly what their name suggests: building a collaborative network. And knowing how vast and isolated and challenging Australia can feel, it made my heart sing.

But oh my god is it WORK. I mean, I think this kind of engagement should be the norm for high impact consultations/projects that require input from across Australia. But it is hard and requires a lot of prep and did I mention @AICollaborative are all volunteers?

Community engagement is exhausting and time consuming and the work involved typically unfunded. People run on passion and energy until they run out.

What @AICollaborative 's event showed me was that where there *is* funding for community engagement (where we pay outside consultants big bucks to do engagement, or gov is doing consultations), we don't do them nearly well enough.

I have taken away lessons in how to do engagement more effectively from @AICollaborative, and warm fuzzies about the sheer number of people across Oz interested in these topics. Can someone give them more money already? To do more cool things (and have their time paid for).

So congratulations @yolandasamy @nlothian @AICollaborative and your army of volunteers for a lovely event. And thank you @TheAIML for supporting their event, and bringing me along to talk to your community as well.

From @AIML, @MsAliAnderson is doing incredible things to change the way computer science and STEM engages and inspires. For girls and women, for policy makers and businesses, for mathematicians and engineers.

Again, no ego. A gutsy determination to push the domain further. A Keen sense of how to translate complex ML into insights communities can engage with. I am excited to watch what @TheAIML does with @MsAliAnderson involved.

Long thread, but I had to share. Follow all the names and organisations in this thread, they connect AI interests across Australia. And I apologise in advance to everyone who asks me in person "how was Adelaide?" over the next couple of weeks and hears this all over again. 🙃