AI Governance Projects
Summary
- Projects are an opportunity to start contributing to AI Governance
- During session 8, you’ll develop your project idea, and you’ll get feedback from your peers and facilitator
- From sessions 9-12, you’ll work on your project
- You’ll submit your project by 24 November
Intro
As we conclude the learning phase of the AI Governance course, you’ll begin your project. This is an opportunity to build or do something new, and it will enable you to:
- Apply the knowledge you’ve gained from the course thus far
- Develop your portfolio to help you land new opportunities
- Make a genuinely valuable contribution to the field
- Take your next steps in AI governance
- Have fun working on something impactful and interesting!
What to expect
During session 8, you’ll brainstorm project ideas and select one to discuss with your peers during session 8. The prompts in the exercises will help you develop this idea, and you can review our upcoming list of ideas for inspiration. In the session, your cohort will help you improve your idea.
From session 9 to session 12 you will:
- Work on your project.
- Meet weekly with your cohort. Unlike the taught content sessions, where the bulk of learning is done during the meetings, projects are focused on work done independently. There are minimal readings and preparation, and sessions will be focused on feedback from your peers and facilitator.
After session 12, you will:
- Submit your project by 24 November. Put the final touches on your project, and submit it. Your project should have an output that you can share with others. You should produce some product as a result of your project. This might be the project itself, a blog post or YouTube video explaining your project, or something else entirely.
- Publish your project. We’d be excited for you to share your project on your LinkedIn, personal website, or other platform. We recommend attaching your name to it, but you’re welcome to publish your work anonymously or under a pseudonym.
- Attend the course closing event. You’ll discuss your work in small breakouts with other participants. Finally, we’ll announce the winners of the project competition, award prizes, and close out the course.
How do I make the most out of the Project Phase?
Start with a narrow project scope.
Write out one (just one!) primary deliverable for your project. This will help you to stay laser-focused on scoping and completing your project, as well as make it more likely to deliver something successful. A good question to ask yourself is “could I make this simpler?”. You can always expand the scope of your project later if you do complete it quickly!
Just do it!
In our experience, the best projects happen when you focus on a concrete, narrow idea and iterate quickly. A common failure mode is to spend four weeks planning and researching what to do. If in doubt, take action!
Try to create an executable outline by session 9. Then ask for specific feedback from:
- Your project cohort
- Your facilitator
- The AISF Slack workspace
- People you know in your target audience
- People you trust
You’ll learn a lot more from the project by creating multiple versions and iterating, rather than trying to create one perfect version.
Commit to one idea
There are loads of exciting projects you could work on! The key is picking one and sticking to it. Although it is tempting to try out many things, you won’t have enough time to do multiple ideas well. You will get more out of the experience by focusing on just one path. If you do want to pursue multiple ideas, consider picking one to do now and doing others after the course.
Carve out the time to work on your project
Although the discussion sessions serve as a space for accountability, you’re much more likely to put the time into working on the project if you carve out space in your calendar to put your head down. If it suits your style, you could even have co-working sessions with your cohort or others on the course!
Similar to how you have better discussions when you’ve prepared for the sessions, you’ll get better feedback and learn more when you’ve put time into your project. Consistency will bring you far with your project, even if it’s just a few hours a week.
Ask for help
Doing novel work is difficult! Throughout the Project Phase, you should leverage your facilitator and peers for support (such as in your cohort channel or #dumb-questions-encouraged). Remember that we’re all here because we want to learn: the bar for asking for help should be very low.
How do we evaluate projects?
Below are the criteria that we'll use to evaluate projects.
Clarity and presentation
- It's unclear what the key takeaways from the project are.
- The project is presented clearly (ie: easy to pick up on the key takeaways) OR it's possible (if unclear) to understand the project, and there is an answerable question/hypothesis or measurable goal.
- The project is presented clearly (ie: easy to pick up on the key takeaways), plus [the research has a question or hypothesis it aims to answer OR the project has a goal that it can be evaluated against].
- The above, plus it's a fairly easy and accessible read, i.e. you expect the target audience (if not specified/implied, assume someone who has just finished participating in the course) could understand the key takeaways and conclusions.
- The above, plus there's something special about the presentation. For example, it is particularly interactive/engaging/well-designed.
AI governance relevance
- The project is not relevant to AI governance.
- The work has some relevance to AI governance, but might be vague. The connection to the course topic is tenuous.
- The work is related to what we'd consider AI governance, focused on the actions governments, corporations, policy professionals, or other actors can take to influence the development of AI.
- The above, plus the work engages with and understands the existing literature, research, history, or current events in AI governance.
- The above, plus it makes a novel contribution to AI governance. This can include new policy proposals, advanced analyses of policies, new ways to interact with or view existing policies, or other contributions that you think are unique.
Quality of research
- The project looks rushed or poorly executed: not what you'd expect of someone seriously trying for 20 hours to put something good together.
- The project is a reasonable attempt (e.g. it looks like it involved some proper thought or skill), but is not novel or especially interesting.
- The project is meaningfully novel and you're glad that someone has done it.
- The above, plus the project is impressive and captures your attention in a positive way. It also might offer clear guidance on next steps to pursue it further (e.g. there are concrete steps made explicit in a further work or next steps section or similar).
- The project blows you away. If you knew people working in this area, you'd be excited to send this on to them for them to read it. Or if you were working in this area, based on this project you'd be excited to work with this person.
Prizes
We’ll award* prizes to the best projects in the following categories:
Best policy design project: £200
Runner-up prize: £50
This prize recognizes unique policy ideas. The winning project will present a novel policy that hasn’t been described before. The problem the policy is trying to solve will be well-explained, and the solution presented will effectively address the stated problem.
Best technical governance project: £200
Runner-up prize: £50
This prize recognizes the contributions of the technical experts looking to upskill in governance on the course. The most detailed governance policies are often those that understand the technology they’re working with. The winning project will seamlessly address core technical challenges in AI governance.
Best governance explainer: £200
Runner-up prize: £50
This prize recognizes projects that take complicated or inaccessible topics and explain them excellently. The winning project will explain an existing topic area in a way that anyone can understand with minimal context or prior knowledge.
Best interactive deliverable: £200
Runner-up prize: £50
This prize recognizes the importance of communicating your work by creating an engaging and interactive deliverable, such as a visualization, game, simulation, website, or other tool that allows users to explore your project results. The winning project will effectively communicate an important idea from your project in an interesting and accessible manner.
Outstanding governance project awards: three winners, £200 each.
Excellence often doesn’t fit into nice boxes. This prize recognizes outstanding projects that don’t fit into the other prize categories we’ve defined. The winning projects will be extremely high-quality, unique contributions to their respective fields.
*Note that BlueDot Impact does not endorse policy ideas. Winning an award is not an endorsement of your idea. Rather, it is a reflection of the quality of your work.
FAQs
Why do we do projects?
The core governance curriculum is an overview of the AI governance landscape. Projects empower you to become a subject matter expert on a narrow, vertical slice of the field. You'll sharpen your skills and produce something useful.
We think projects are the most rewarding part of the AI governance course. You get to demonstrate your knowledge on a specific topic. Moreover, projects ensure you have a tangible product at the end of the course. There’s a lot you can do with that product. Past projects have helped learners get jobs in the field, find new opportunities, and launch new initiatives.
What should I do for my project?
You can read our blog post on project ideas, review past Governance projects and view ideas for Alignment projects. Please note that in this iteration, we are discouraging learners from focusing their project on planning their next career move.
Tentative ideas include conducting research on an open governance question, generating new ideas or proposals for today’s AI systems, evaluating existing proposals and governance actions based on defined criteria, or predicting future policy needs that might arise from advanced AI systems. The best project ideas will be narrowly tailored, novel, and based on your strengths and curiosities. Your project idea should be something that you’d be excited and motivated to work on for four weeks.
Can I work on a project with someone else?
Yes, as long as everyone in the group is contributing and learning during the project. However, we expect most participants to do projects independently.
If you have already agreed to work on a project with someone else, please indicate this in the project details form that we send around the time of session 8 so we can put you in the same cohort!
Will I be in the same cohort?
By default, everyone will remain in the same cohort unless your cohort is disbanded or you choose to switch to another cohort.
Are there prizes?
The best projects will receive a prize! We’ll share more information about this soon.
Is it okay to work on a project that I have already started? (e.g. before the course start)
We encourage participants to pursue new ideas. We may make an exception for an existing project if it meets the same bar for relevance as any other project and will produce a deliverable to submit after session 12.
Facilitators: what should I know?
Very little should change for facilitators. You’ll continue to meet in your existing cohorts.
Lead cohorts: what changes for us?
If you’re in a lead cohort, you’ll proceed as normal. You will have the same deadline as other cohorts.
What about the project details form?
In previous iterations, we sent participants a form to collect basic details about your project idea. In this iteration, we are not collecting this information. Please speak to your facilitator to receive feedback about your project idea.
I have a different question
Feel free to ask in your session 8 discussion, or in #governance-2024-aug-logistics-questions.