Towards Openness Beyond Open Access: User Journeys through 3 Open AI Collaboratives

Jennifer Ding, Christopher Akiki, Yacine Jernite, Anne Lee Steele, Temi Popo

Keywords: open ai, open science, community research, open collaboration

TL;DR: Open AI collaboratives like BigScience Workshop, The Turing Way, and Mozilla Festival’s Building Trustworthy AI Working Group offer new pathways for distributed, volunteer-led communities to redefine how AI is developed by whom, and for whom.

Abstract: Open Artificial Intelligence (Open source AI) collaboratives offer alternative pathways for how AI can be developed beyond well-resourced technology companies and who can be a part of the process. To understand how and why they work and what additionality they bring to the landscape, we focus on three such communities, each focused on a different kind of activity around AI: building models (BigScience workshop), tools/ways of working (The Turing Way), and ecosystems (Mozilla Festival’s Building Trustworthy AI Working Group). First, we document the community structures that facilitate these distributed, volunteer-led teams, comparing the collaboration styles that drive each group towards their specific goals. Through interviews with community leaders, we map user journeys for how members discover, join, contribute, and participate. Ultimately, this paper aims to highlight the diversity of AI work and workers that have come forth through these collaborations and how they offer a broader practice of openness to the AI space.