Our work depends on a distributed ecosystem of actors. Some design and run the deliberative processes themselves. Others fund them, evaluate them, or help build the enabling infrastructure: the standards, guides, and community spaces that allow the field to grow. AIDF sits at the nexus of these other organizations, working to identify and prioritize gaps and opportunities to advance democratic governance.

Philanthropists and Funders

The gap between the promise of democratic representation in AI governance and current practice is, in significant part, a funding gap.

We act as a thought partner for funders navigating this space, helping them design funding strategies that build sustainable infrastructure rather than one-off pilots.

Our goal is to ensure they are well-informed about goings-on in the relevant ecosystems and have the information they need to channel funding towards organizations and projects that are underserved and vitally important.

AI companies

We help frontier AI labs and builders identify where public deliberation is most needed and connect them to practitioners capable of running rigorous processes. Over time, we aim to support labs in developing irrevocable governance commitments that include democratic participation as a trigger condition for high stakes decisions.

Builders

We also work with labs and builders on running democratic experiments, creating policies, and investing in technologies that:

• enable new forms of democratic engagement (i.e. tools to support collective coordination)
• make their own decision-making structure more democratic (i.e. engage larger groups of people in making key decisions)

Practitioners (Civil Society)

We actively engage, convene, and collaborate with different civil society organizations working around AI or democracy. These might include civic technologists who are developing new tools or processes to support democratic decision-making and want to explore new opportunities enabled by AI, or groups working on policy and theory for making democracies more resilient.

We work with these groups to share tools, methods, and findings across the ecosystem; to surface existing deliberative use cases that deserve wider recognition; and to help organizations build the internal capacity to commission, evaluate, or run participatory processes themselves.

See: DelibTech network

Regulators (governments, governance bodies and policy-makers)

Governments, as institutions accountable to the public, are natural homes for the kind of deliberative AI governance we’re working towards.

We support meaningful experimentation where it emerges, directly by suggesting or partnering with deliberative practitioners and organizations (many of whom have already worked at local, regional, national and transnational levels), and by supporting critical project preparation phases such as scoping, process suitability and connecting actors. We do not primarily design or implement representative deliberative processes ourselves. We pay close attention to where meaningful experimentation is happening, looking out for the use cases and key instances where democratic innovation is being applied to AI decisions. We’re drawing on those as both evidence and inspiration for the broader ecosystem.

We also maintain close relationships with policymakers, both inside and outside AI labs, who are grappling with how democratic innovation can be brought to bear on AI governance decisions. And we participate in multilateral convenings around AI and actively contribute to conversations about how democratic representation can support international AI coordination.

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