Alek Tarkowski
Alek Tarkowski is the Director of Strategy at Open Future. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of Creative Commons. He has 20 years of experience with public interest advocacy and movement building. He is a sociologist by training and holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the Polish Academy of Science. Previously, he was part of the Wikimedia Movement Strategy process as a member of the Partnerships working group.
Sessions
It has been a year since Wikimedians took the stage in Singapore to share their excitement, concerns, and open questions about the impact of ChatGPT and other generative AI technology on our movement. This panel will bring together 5-6 diverse voices from our movement – volunteers, affiliates, researchers, and Wikimedia Foundation staff – to discuss how Generative AI is showing up in our movement's collective work to grow and sustain the sum of human knowledge.
The panel will aim to review current advocacy strategies in the free knowledge movement and identify ways in which they need to be adapted. We are in particular interested in understanding how an expanded view of free knowledge – that takes into considerations new challenges around concentration of power, surveillance, market competition or emergent technologies - requires us to revise our advocacy strategies.
Our session would be a panel discussion highlighting the learnings from a side event on "Shared Advocacy for the Knowledge Commons" organized by Creative Commons, Open Future, Open Knowledge Foundation, and Wikimedia Europe Wikimania’s day zero. This event will bring together 50-60 activists and experts with an interest in broadly understood advocacy work (including communication and technology experts). During the panel session the organizers, together with participants, will be able to report back the outcomes of the side event back to the Wikimania community.
What does the use of Wikimedia projects for AI training imply? How can our projects serve as a model for public AI systems, platforms, and communities? Is AI more than the latest way wiki content is being reused, or does it present a challenge that calls for the exploration of new governance methods for the production, distribution, and usage of the knowledge commons?
This session will address these questions and introduce the Public AI Network, an international coalition dedicated to advancing public-interest and publicly-owned AI around the world.