Weeknotes — Time to jAIm!
It’s time to jam my friends…with new tech. AI more specifically. Have some fun with it. And hopefully find out how AI can help us in our work along the way, and how we feel about it all. Who knows, some of us might even find our new BFF down that AI rabbit hole! (“are you free tonight GPT?!”)
The latest charity digital skills report found that:
- 66% are interested in making the best use of emerging technologies
- 78 per cent of respondents agreed that AI was relevant to their charity and could transform it.
- But over half of charities also said they were constrained by lack of time, resources or skills to engage with AI.
So how do you find the time to explore and get a feel for this exciting new tech?
Getting inspired by what others are doing
I had an ‘aha’ moment while facilitating one of our recent Digital Leads Network meetups and hearing how our network’s members finding space in their work to experiment with generative AI. There was an assumption that no one had time for it but actually many charities were really getting stuck in. Magid El-Amin from Catch22 in particular showcased brilliant ways in which they were experimenting with AI. He also shared that they allocate x amount of hours each per month to create space to play with tech and see how it can help their work. Others in the group also shared how they were making space for this. Aha! The joys of peer learning!
Jamming
Inspired by others I pitched the idea to my colleagues of creating a new collaborative space to explore how new emerging tech can help us in our work (and beyond). The wonderful thing about working at CAST is that people welcome new ideas and get excited about innovation. So I buddy’ed up with my great colleague Natalie to create a simple ‘Tech Jam’ space. Knowing that everyone was time poor and didn’t really want more ‘meetings’, we’ve designed the space so part of the collaborative work can be done asynchronously. The first iteration is focused on AI and includes a space to :
- Warm up — get some basic understanding of the new tech we’re experimenting with
- Share how we’re each feeling about AI -I was also inspired by Kat Dixon’s great work at Snook who ran a couple of sessions on AI for service designers (I borrowed the emotions matrix they used in the spirit of reuse, cheers!)
- Share how each member of the team has been using the new tech in their daily work and which tools they’ve been using
- Share opportunities and risks
- Work together on next steps and things we want to do next
Most of the above tasks can be actioned asynchronously. We’ve then planned to meet for 75 minutes for some synchronous work, to make space for some live demo sharing, play back some of the case scenarios that have come up, as well as have some time to delve deeper into the opportunities for our work. Here’s hoping that this could be a first step towards carving out more space for some very important playing! I’ll share more of our AI findings in future weeknotes.
Resources to warm up
Keen to have a jam too? Here are some of the resources we shared with the team to ‘warm up’ ahead of our Tech Jam, in case you want to get involved with your team:
- Generative AI — what is it is good for? (6-min watch — by the Economist)
- What does AI mean for charities? (2-min read-by Zoe Amar via Third Sector)
- Generative AI guide for Scotland’s voluntary sector (10-min browse)
- What public digital thinks about AI (5-min read)
- AI and the future of humanity (41-min watch) by Yuval Noah Harari at the Frontiers Forum => You can get a summary lowdown and key excerpts via this podcast: The AI breakdown (20-min listen)
Are you experimenting with generative AI in your work? If so, get in touch, we’d love to find out you’re getting on, what’s helpful, and get inspired by others! Drop me a message on here or at david.scurr@wearecast.org.uk.
