Greetings
Hello, Fellows and Friends of the Fellowship. Welcome to the Spring 2026 session! We have had a busy, but very successful winter season.
Quick Reminders
Fill in the Summer Retreat Poll.
Sign up for learn.beta.theaulafellowship.org
Update your bio and works on the web.
Reach out to Fellows for connections.
Recent Achievements
Thanks to the efforts of Fellows through the last two quarters of 2025, we have officially launched the Aula Convening Guidelines, and begun organizing 5 Global Convenings for this year.
Thanks very much to our sponsors and Fellows of the Conference Team: Two Fellows went to AI House Davos and found some nice people to work with there. Our principal sponsors, the ImpactIA Foundation is empowering an international effort to coordinate for AI that serves society well, and engaging with partners to facilitate the negotiation of a new social contract. Please, check out and support their work.
Fellows went to AI Summit India and found some nice people to work with there, too.
We have launched the Learning Management System (LMS) for the Qualification badges. What a great team effort! Fellows with Google credentials can access it at learn.beta.theaulafellowship.org. Fellows can see #action-badges for more information.
We are proud to join the Global Trust Challenge as an Outreach Partner. This is a policy accelerator program with AI Commons, IEEE, OECD, UNESCO, and GPAI. 7 Aula Fellow teams submitted to participate, and several Fellows will be joining them in support.
Summer Retreat Poll
We’re planning a Summer Retreat for Fellows and Friends this year in Montreal. Please see and complete this Summer Retreat Poll to help determine the trip type and date options. This is not a booking – you are not registering for anything. We will use the responses to make arrangements and then send out invitations.
Volunteering
A BIG thank you to all of the volunteer Fellows who support operations! We welcome anyone who wants to work together to further our mission and impact. Anyone interested in getting involved can refer to the Current Projects spreadsheet to see what’s going on.
The Survivor’s Dashboard
At AI House Davos 2026, the Survivor’s Dashboard was introduced as a human-curated resource designed to support awareness and understanding of exploitation and trafficking. The focus was on raising awareness, engaging stakeholders, and gathering early feedback to ensure the dashboard remains practical, responsible, and survivor-centered. The engagement at Davos helped position the dashboard as a thoughtful, human-led resource, while also opening the door for future collaboration with organizations interested in survivor support, research, and policy development.
All Africa AI
We have several Fellows in several countries of Africa. Our Senior Fellow Uloma is convening an All Africa AI Working Group. Please let her know if you are interested. All Africans are welcome, including North Africans and the Diaspora. All Fellows are also welcome to support, but we are making a specific effort to ensure that African leadership is prioritized and amplified with this initiative.
Onboarding
We are proud to have welcomed many new fellows to the Aula mission this season. We have made some revisions to streamline the onboarding process and are working on some potential video training guides as well.
New fellows should start by looking at the Fellow’s Onboarding Checklist in Slack which provides guidance on navigating Slack channels, completing the onboarding badges, getting an Aula email set up, and steps for joining projects.
Please reach out to our onboarding team, Uloma and Andrew, with any questions!
Vignette on the Aula Convening Guidelines in Practice
Senior Fellow Ley Muller held a short workshop as part of a Norwegian NGO kick-off meeting in Trondheim, Norway last month and successfully used the Aula convening guidelines to facilitate discussions around community auditing of AI systems.
In Ley’s workshop, 60+ participants first aligned on high-level understandings of different AI systems through discussing daily examples: spam filters, opening your phone through your fingerprint, self-driving cars, and of course, ChatGPT. Participants reflected on their own communities, then engaged in case studies to have group discussions centered on decision making, development, and use of AI tools.
Using the Aula Convening Guidelines as a foundational model, Ley’s workshop enabled discourse that honored different types of power and reflection of how these are honored across communities. This framework advanced the workshop’s goal of ensuring the conversation on AI includes unheard perspectives of women and minorities in Trondheim by emphasizing opportunities for engagement.
Great job, Ley! Thank you for setting a great example of how to use the Aula Convening Guidelines to bolster group discussions around AI. Read more about the workshop in our Works & News blog post here.
Impact
We continue to bring together scholars, professionals, and enthusiasts working across technology, engineering education, management, politics and international relations, governance, and development economics. We remain intentionally open to fellows from all disciplines and skill sets because of the challenges we address.
A central pillar of our work is a strong commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals, viewing AI not merely as a technical innovation but as a social, economic, and political force that can either accelerate progress toward the SDGs or, if poorly governed, exacerbate existing inequalities. For this reason, our work examines not only what AI can do, but also how it is designed, deployed, and regulated across diverse global contexts. These questions cannot be separated from geopolitics: conflict, economic realignment, sanctions, trade disruptions, and shifting power dynamics directly shape development pathways, technological access, and institutional capacity.
Since 2023, Aula Fellows have produced more than 500 outputs across research, policy, and technology, all conceived as a means of ensuring that everyone can access the conversation on how is rolled out into society.
An International Strategy
As we grow, we’re better serving our mission to ensure that everyone can access the conversation on AI. Following from our collective creation of the Aula Convening Guidelines and the specific relationships We’ve been able to make, our International Strategy has four aspects:
1. Convening Global Society events internationally, to facilitate conversations between civil society and all its parts. The 5 topics are introduced here.
2. Conference Impact Team for Fellows: Fellows and Friends of the Fellowship can optimize their conference impact to further their personal/professional goals and connect people to the conversation on AI.
3. Though access is an international issue, we have several African Fellows and are convening in several ways to ensure that the African community can reach the international conversation on tech governance.
4. Working with global conveners on events to support negotiations for a new social contract. To this end, we are engaging with international organizers to practice the work as a Fellowship and identify parties that have goals in line with our Mission. We are in the AI space, that’s the focus of the Fellowship. In and for the 2030 events, we will work towards building coalitions across sectors.
Outreach Partners for The Global Trust Challenge
We have joined a significant international effort, The Global Trust Challenge, a worldwide policymaking accelerator to secure digital services trust-worthiness. As a Global Outreach Partner, we have supported 7 teams to complete their proposals. In the next phase, we will offer support to participants.
Global Convenings on AI
Following our participation in AI House Davos we have been working on questions of power, access, and missing voices in AI governance. As a result, we have launched 5 global civil society convenings to facilitate field-shaping conversations on AI. These are the convenings and the key questions and objectives they seek to address..
- AI Sustainability Council: Convenings for the environment
- Convening on Military AI: What do we want and need from military AI?
- Connecting Africa to Global AI Governance: What tools and methods will connect us to each other on international tech governance?
- The AI Comedy Council & Road Show: What can comedy say that we aren’t hearing? Where can we say it? And what’s for lunch?
- AI House Davos 2027: Convenings to connect people to the whole conversation.
Projects are underway and are actively recruiting fellows to support planning, research, and coordination. Please contact the teams to get involved!
Introducing our New Website!
We’ve upgraded the website. The goals are to serve as our knowledge base and Fellow’s roster, to highlight the works of our Fellows and provide information about our organization to encourage support for our mission.
This is our collective database. It contains about ⅓ of our work so far. You can link people to this page to see what we are working on. The drop-down menu at the top shows the full breadth of topics, sectors, and types of work we cover, as well as the works of individual Fellows. If you don’t see your works listed, use the Portfolio Form to send in an update.
This is where you can search for collaborators, and where you can send other people who are interested in knowing what you do. Every Fellow has a portfolio page that provides your picture, bio, links to your LinkedIn profile and other personal websites, as well as a list of your submitted Works. Take a moment to see if your bio and photo are up to date. If not, use the Portfolio form to send in an update. Please contact Andrew to create your profile on the website if you haven’t been added already.
This page outlines the three services we offer: Events, Advisory, and Arbitrage. Please, take a short moment to take a look through them so that you know what services we offer and can recommend them to people in your community who have a need. All Fellows are welcome to join the #services Slack
channel to learn or work together on entrepreneurial-style services delivery. We train. If a work falls out of our Mission scope, we recommend Fellows to the requester.
This page covers current projects seeking support, summaries of our mission statement and funding model, and introductions to our various teams. The goal is for Fellows and Friends to use this page to learn more about the various ways they can get involved to support the Mission.
Conference Impact Team for You
We are very proud to announce that the International Conference Support Team is up and running. Volunteer-based for now, offered by Fellows with experience, enthusiasm, and/or professional credentials, this team is available to support you when you attend a conference.
This is for Fellows and Friends of the Fellowship, so that you can optimize your conference impact in terms of your personal/professional goals. This can increase your impact in terms of connecting more people to the conversation on AI via your work. The services provided include:
- Conference planning and coaching
- Research on the fly (i.e., Who in this next panel is a likely ally to the mission? What does this study say? What does that company?)
- Amplification of your outreach
- Coaching for written publications and video
- Access to the Aula Fellowship platforms
Because we are Fellows, you can also present potential connections into Fellow’s networks. Friends of the Fellowship are welcome to request this service, probono.
Documentary
We have been collecting interviews to produce a short video tentatively titled “The Road to Davos: Visit to AI House.” The purpose is to present the experience of the 2026 visit to Davos and share its intentions and outcomes. Pre- and post-Davos interviews have been carried out with two Aula fellows, Tammy Mackenzie and François Pelletier. Two more interviews are pending.
The ambition is to compile footage from events attended by Aula Fellows, with the goal of creating one or more videos that share our perspective on different areas of AI development across various regions.
Clips from the compiled footage will be rolled out across The Aula Fellowship social media platforms to further tell the story of our work and our view of the impact of AI. Coming soon on LinkedIn and our upcoming new YouTube channel.
Tech
We aim to self-host our informational resources, such as the website, which is based on WordPress and our e-learning platform for Fellows, which is based on Moodle. We are looking for help in building the content on this platform from existing documents, mainly the Training Worksheets, and allow our resources to be accessed more interactively. Please contact Francois or Andrew if you are interested in supporting the construction of our e-Learning platform. We provide training so no prior website building experience is required.
We are launching a project on Small AI. We are looking for a citizen-focused benchmark for AI algorithms on consumer devices. This has a double goal: first and foremost, reuse existing hardware and slow the massive environmental load of the construction and exploitation of data centers. Second, have the population get in touch with the algorithms themselves and discuss how they can actually be useful in their everyday life. Empowering people to own their data and their means of computation is a strong way to avoid leaving SDGs in the hands of corporate black boxes. Join us in #research-small-ai in Slack for more info.
We are building capacity to understand the implication of criminal networks in AI governance (CNAIG), through research examining major archives of malfeasance such as forced labor, trafficking, money laundering, gangsterism, corruption, and tax evasion. As this content can be trauma-inducing, we are not asking specific individuals to join. You are welcome to request access to this project.
Portfolio Form
The Portfolio Form has been updated so that it is easier to navigate and faster to complete. Please use it to submit any publications, blog posts, panels and public appearances, or exciting milestones you’ve achieved so that we can add it to your profile on the Aula website, and highlight your great work.
Coordinator’s Note
We have been working hard to improve the onboarding process, our organization’s resources and workflow, and optimizing opportunities for engagement. Our goal is to allow Fellows to seek opportunities and get involved with new projects as easily as possible.
We’re grateful to see our organization is growing quickly. If you have any feedback on how we can improve the onboarding process and our operational workflow, we are happy to hear your thoughts.
Thank you all for your wonderful work and it’s a pleasure to work with you! 😊
-Andrew & Team
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