The fact the pass covers travel down to London anytime on outbound travel day can also make a big saving if you're not London based and travelling weekday morning etc.

+1. Just got back yesterday from 2 weeks of Brussels, Berlin, Stuttgart, Paris with our two. Was great way to travel. Booked Brussels->Berlin sleeper direct but all the rest on a pass. Great value too with kids under 11.

Long list of the session recordings available at the URL in the post.

Over half way through uploading recordings from @pairs.site 2026: critical presentations on participatory approaches to AI development, governance and resistance. www.pairs.site/Session-reco...

Most talks are < 15 minutes, and packed with ideas & insights. Papers & slides linked where available.

MozFest 2026 dates announced (UK October half-term), and an interrail pass sale on this week. Well, it would be silly not to book a pass & lock in all the 🚆 travel from home in the UK for less than the price of flights (4 day pass + max reservations cost). (www.interrail.eu/en)

The idea that early intervention will negate the need for later support plays into a narrative of quick fixes for deep trauma, and does little to validate experience of adopters, or challenge a parent blaming culture.

MacAlister recognised that it is "challenging to get money" from the fund and it's only a short-term support system. "We need to get to the point where families don't get to this point," he said.

As adopters, our kids have often got to the point of needing ongoing or intensive periods of therapeutic support long before they join our families.

Tone of government engagement betrayal a desire to avoid that reality...

MacAlister said that "for too long" the current system had focused on "late-stage crisis intervention rather than getting in early with support without judging you." He added that he had increased the budget for the Adoption Support Fund in England by 10% this year "so more families can get support", despite it being cut in 2025. The Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund (ASGSF) provides government money for therapeutic treatment.

The continued failure of DfE Ministers to understand the reality of adoption is deeply disheartening, and their statements feel disingenuous.

Adoption & Special Guardianship Support Fund remains cut by 40%+ for individual child with budgets inadequate to fund support

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

AI Impact Summit: Empty rhetoric fails public in Delhi meet amid elite push AI Summits: AI Impact Summit in Delhi exposed tokenism and elite capture behind inclusion claims. From Bletchley to Paris leaders tout safety and innovation critics flag algorithmic harms, biometric s...

I'm a bit late sharing this, but this from @jenitennison.com is a really useful review of the trajectory of recent AI Summits www.deccanherald.com/opinion/empt... - and the need to support the 'necessary friction of democracy' in AI governance

m-otherboard.ghost.io/collective-i... This is inspired.

I'm facilitating a small group conversation at this event next week - on anticipating the consequences of technology adoption and development. Lots of other great contributors, hope to see you there!

Photo from room watching PAIRs opening plenary in New Delhi.

Great start to the online day for @pairs.site with a focus on participatory (design) justice and AI, and keeping community in the loop in AI development. Listening from our Hub space in Delhi thanks to JGU Law School.

It's a low fi signal, but still gives quite a lot of context. E.g. our recent Generative AI in Education data report is based on approx (n=1050; h=1 - 2) as students only had an hour or two to participate, whereas there are distributed dialogues of (n=1000; h=16) where groups had a weekend

Was discussing this eve the challenge of getting evidence from deliberation recognised by policymakers. Either it looks easy to dismiss as small n study, or you have to spend a paragraph/slide explaining the method in detail - which doesn't fit into a policy brief or quick policy proof-point.

Deliberation folk: do we have/need a convention for indicating the 'depth' of deliberation when reporting results. Quant data will report for e.g with (n=1000): gives reader quick sense of how to interpret findings. Should deliberation have (n=37; h=30) for 37 people, 30 hours deliberation each.

I'm in Delhi this week for the #IndiaAIImpactSummit and the second edition of our conference on Participatory AI Research and Practice. But @pairs.site is also taking place online on Tuesday. Over travels, and a 🚞 visit to the Taj Mahal yesterday I had a look at some of the 10-minute talks coming up

Landed in Delhi for #IndiaAIImpactSummit and @pairs.site on Weds, but spent the flight reading papers for our online fringe event, PAIRS, on Tuesday. There is some stonking insight, inspiration and challenge lined up on the day for anyone thinking about how to put people & communities first in AI...

An image of a station through a grubby train window as the dusk falls. Not quite the approach to Delhi: it's already too dark. I promised a thread of high quality participatory AI insight and low quality transit photos. I hope I have delivered. Please complete the feedback form on your seat and leave it on the desk as you leave.

And with that, my train pulls back into Delhi. I'll be joining the opening sessions of @pairs.site online from.our hub here on Tuesday. If any of the talks pique your interest (they will be put more accessibly than my short/verbose skeets) do join us via Zoom: details at pairs.site

Central to this is a debate for many of the papers on Wednesday in Delhi: on challenging narrow ideas of democracy as access, or inclusion as inclusion in AI use - and instead looking at how democratic AI is one we can author, audit, refuse, reshape and, in decentralised ways, control.

A couple of papers dig into multilingual AI across the programme: from Kennedy on taking a decolonial lens and rethinking efforts to train AI in low resourced languages www.pairs.site/No-better-pr... to Pakzad on participatory auditing of multi-lingual AI: www.pairs.site/Participator...

Revisiting the Participation Gap: Integrating Public Voices in Regulatory Sandbox Frameworks | Notion This session features at PAIRS 2026 Online on 17th February 2026 13:30 UTC. Registered participants will receive zoom links to join the session via e-mail.

Gupta & Parisio's poster was interesting to read after following @datasphere.bsky.social's work on Sandboxes for Data and AI governance. The authors point to way in which Sandboxes miss chance to embed public voice, but highlight them as potential focus for future work www.pairs.site/Revisiting-t...

Image of TukTuk in traffic. I didn't capture photos of the really intense bits as I was holding on tight rather than taking shots with my phone.

If the papers and slides already shared are anything to go by, PAIRS 2026 Online will be an intense day. But as intense as a week of TukTuk rides and Delhi traffic. I recon it might be a close run thing for anyone who does a full day of PAIRS online: but you can just dip in and out too!

Meaningful Engagement: Lessons from Canada and other Democracies | Notion This presentation at PAIRS 2026 Online on 17th February 2026 14:45 UTC. Registered participants will receive zoom links to join the session via e-mail. 🎙️ Thread on PAIRS Discussion Server (Discord) ...

Michael Moreno's work with Susan Ariel Aaronson critiques government led AI consultations: this time it's Canada in the hot seat. Their ongoing country-by-country documentation of missed opportunities to engage sets the challenge for one gov to break the mould.

www.pairs.site/Meaningful-E...

Stephanie Camarena's 10 minute talk will explore both practical methods (e.g. think-pair-share) and how outputs from dialogue with affected communities on issues such as AI and family violence can feed into technical standards such as those from IEEE. 11 UTC on Tue 17

www.pairs.site/Before-the-P...

Just waiting to board return from @pairs.site program committee outing to Agra, so online conference paper previews (and poor quality travel photography) to resume shortly.

Alas only a day trip. But next time!

A train platform and bridge.

And as we're nearly in Agra I'll pause this thread for now, offering you as promised another compelling snapshot from a moving train.

Rights and incentives: A participation ledger for people centered AI | Notion This presentation at PAIRS 2026 Online on 17th February 2026 16:00 UTC. Registered participants will receive zoom links to join the session via e-mail. 🎙️ Thread on PAIRS Discussion Server (Discord) ...

Although I question whether incentives exist for adoption of the neat tech blueprint laid out: the ideas in here of translating public inputs into verifiable tests & giving stakeholders right to make auditable request to turn off select AI features are v. interesting.

www.pairs.site/Rights-and-i...

At a different scale, Rashid Mushkani from @mila-quebec.bsky.social's 10 min talk will share framework for public input to AI to be traceable & enforceable. What if, alongside reports, public input delivered replayable 'tests' that can verify if systems (and future versions) have applied changes?

This piece highlights for me how spaces to develop AI literacy in community, driven by need, while fostering social agreements about use (& responses to abuse) *is* participatory governance without having to reference firms or govs. Accepting the absense of upwards appeals unlocks self-help models.

From Users to Governors: integrating Ugandan Women's Lived Experiences into Participatory Governance | Notion This presentation at PAIRS 2026 Online on 17th February 2026 11:00 UTC. Registered participants will receive zoom links to join the session via e-mail. 🎙️ Thread on PAIRS Discussion Server (Discord) ...

The work Evelyn Asio Patra will be presenting (17th Feb; 11:00 UTC) challenged me to think differently about participatory governance: relating grassroots networks of Ugandan women exploring adoption of AI: but also local negotiation of use & conflicts/harms www.pairs.site/From-Users-t...