The AI Parade is an initiative from the Netherlands AI Coalition’s Culture and Media working group and Human Centric AI building block. Until December 2023, the AI Parade is travelling to 35 libraries across the country, offering debates, workshops and exhibitions. It involves a variety of engaging activities that can reach a broad target audience.
Purpose of the AI Parade
The AI Parade aims to engage a million members of the public in the conversation about AI. The impact and reach of the AI Parade are being carefully measured. The input it provides will be fed back from the participating libraries to the Netherlands AI Coalition.
The library as a place to meet
A library is the ideal spot for the AI Parade: the kind of place anyone can go to with no worries – so it is the right place for making even a complex concept like AI understandable. It’s no coincidence that a fifth of all residents of the Netherlands are library members and that annual visitor numbers for all libraries taken together are around 62 million. Libraries also have an important task in actively helping members of the public to be part of the information society, for instance by providing training and facilitating the public dialogue.
Activities
In each participating library, three lines of activities are set up for one month: an exhibition, dialogue sessions and workshops. The library is left free to decide the format. As co-creators of the programme, the libraries involved are responsible for their own programming. The exhibition is developed by the National Library of the Netherlands (KB) together with the library sector and AI hubs in the region. The library staff will get training for setting up the dialogue sessions. Lectures and workshops are organised by the library in cooperation with local partners. The idea is to pay specific attention to local topics in the library for that target area. This means that the AI Parade will have a generic part and a local part.
Planning and working method
The start of the AI Parade took place in three pilot libraries in Overijssel to develop and test the general part of the AI Parade. These pilot libraries have cooperated with relevant regional parties involved in AI. After these preparations, subsequent libraries started working with the formats and methods developed. This will create a feedback loop in which knowledge is continuously exchanged and those involved learn from each other’s experiences. The impact measurements will play a crucial role in this. The results will be recorded and published by the NL AIC after the AI Parade has finished. Please visit our agenda to see where the AI Parade will take place.
Funding
To implement the AI Parade, the KB received funding from the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, the digital citizenship programme line of the Pica Foundation, the Netherlands AI Coalition and the Media Literacy Network. The NL AIC acts as an advisory body as well as providing practical support and input for developing and implementing the AI Parade.
More information
If you are interested in more information about the social dialogue, visit this page or contact Náhani Oosterwijk. If you would like to know more about the ELSA concept, you can take a look at this page.