Our Digital Futures Fest by IT for Change
The good folks at IT for Change invited me to participate in a few sessions as part of their 25th anniversary celebration event Our Digital Futures Fest. The events were spread across 30th October, 31st October, and 1st November at the Infosys Science Foundation building in Bengaluru. (I know. It’s been almost two months. I’ll do better.). What follows are notes from the events that I participated in and my contributions.
EdTech for Equitable Education: Critical Conversations event
The fest started with the “EdTech for Equitable Education” event, featuring panel discussions and a fireside chat with Mr. Anvar Sadath, CEO, KITE. I was invited to participate in the panel discussion on “Where is the Ed in EdTech?”. The panel format was different than what I was used to - panelists were expected to speak up to 5 minutes on the topic, after which the moderator would start with further questions. When it came was my turn to speak, I focused on the agency and curiosity aspects of the education ecosystem and the FOSS ecosystem.
Specifically, I talked about how software (and AI) interventions in the education space seem to be taking away agency from the students and the teachers, for instance, making the educational material feel “static” and “unchangable” instead of making it “dynamic” and “fluid”. I talked about my personal experience with FOSS during my undergrad education, which made me experience the educational material in an interactive and engaging way, for instance, by creating simple physics simulations that users can interact/tweak via the internet. Software (and now AI) in the education space has gone down the path of digital content and exams, and tracking the students (and teachers) in never-before-imagined ways.
When taken seriously, FOSS tends to make people curious, because of the simple fact that people have access to the source code, and it’s usually FOSS all the way down the stack. With proprietary software stacks in the education sector, we prevent the possibility of even a few students developing a “hacker” interest in the software. With AI in the education sector, we risk making the situation worse, given the black-box nature of AI models.
Together, these exacerbate the situation in the indian education sector where students are taught to be tool users instead of creators. FOSS in the education sector is imperative to ensure that students with interest can cultivate a curiosity for software, which could even benefit those around them not curious about software. Integrating FOSS and digital commons into education moves us closer towards treating knowledge as an active process instead of passively receiving and storing information.
I don’t remember much of the Q&A that followed. While I was the only “FOSS representative” on the panel and one of few folks from the FOSS community in the event, I’m happy to report that most people reacted positively to comments about FOSS in the Education space. Conversations centered around how we could make FOSS work in the Education sector, and not if FOSS belonged in the Education sector.
The event was covered by their media partner “The Hindu” - ‘Gaps in education cannot be bridged by layering technology over it’ - The Hindu
There were three people at the event whose perspectives were new and insightful to me
- Mr. Anil Mammen Varghese. TISS
- Mr. Balasubrahmanian S, Chrysalis
- Prof. Rajaram Sharma, Central Institute of Educational Technology, NCERT
Regen AI Futures: Dimensions, Dilemmas, and Directions
The Regen AI Futures: Dimensions, Dilemmas, and Directions panel discussion explored what a “regenerative” AI ecosystem would entail, as opposed to the current hyperextractive AI ecosystem. Like before, my comments attempted to bring the FOSS philosophy/ideology into these conversations. Unlike the previous panel discussion where panelists were expected to speak for a few minutes on the topic, we jumped straight into questions.
I pointed out that proactive vulnerability disclosures from AI orgs were a major point of concern when discussing the “silences” surrounding the current GenerativeAI hype. Web3 is going great is a project by Molly White where she documents Web3/Crypto/Blockchain harm, and I pointed out that an equivalent for the AI space is needed. I contrasted the situation with the FOSS ecosystem where security vulnerabilities are reported, publicly disclosed, triaged, and addressed. Later, I learnt about the AI Incident Database and the AI Risk Initiative by MIT.
Later in the panel discussion, I pointed out a few instances of AI (and technology in general) were “regenerative” or “restorative” for a community, e.g., by helping them document and spread information about their cultural artifacts, their language, their history. But I also pointed out that the current discourse heavily favors large monolithic AI systems that attempt to effectively wipe away diversity, instead of working towards technology and systems that empower grassroots AI (and technology) efforts. Unfortunately, this is as much as I can remember of the event.
This event was covered by their media partner “The Hindu” - Experts decode hype around Gen AI - The Hindu
Towards RegenerativeAI - AI Impact Summit pre-event
Towards RenegerativeAI felt like the main event during the fest. It was a closed-door event with 50-ish participants from various fields of expertise. and the agenda focused on breakout sessions that required groups of participants to interrogate AI from different lenses. Like I mentioned in an earlier post, this might have been what the Takshashila GCPP Tech Policy squad discussions would have looked like had they happened in-person during my cohort. The event was organized under Chatham House rule, because of which I’ll only provide a summary of the event discussions without attributions. But an official event report should be published in the near future.
The event started with a short quiz where the answers to the questions lay on a spectrum and the audience was asked to physically get up and move to represent their answer; for example, left-most meant X and right-most meant Y. It felt a little weird at the time, but looking back at the whole agenda, it was a great way to get the participants to get into the right mental state to engage with each other throughout the day. The participants were seated around tables of ~10 people, and the next event asked the tables to spend 30-ish minutes discussing a prompt amongst themselves and share a summary with the rest. Again, this prepped the participants (at least it helped me) for the breakout sessions that were to come.
The participants were then broken up into 5 groups - each looking at RegenerativeAI from a particular lens. Presentations were made to set the tone for the lenses that the groups would use to investigate AI, leading to the breakout sessions. The breakout sessions were 4+ hours long on Friday (31st October) and 3+ hours long on Saturday (1st November), and they were an incredible experience. Our group had leaders from civil society, including two participants from outside India, and people with tech and non-tech roles/backgrounds. Folks from IT for Change helped the groups summarize and present our discussions to the rest of the groups, all of which ended up informing the event report and recommendations to the AI Impact Summit.
Unfortunately, I’m unable to report anything else at the moment. I will try to improve my comments here by digging up additional notes from the event.
Final thoughts
It’s worth noting that conversations from the event directly influenced my op-ed “What are the real costs of AI?”
Having experienced them twice now, I want to take this form of breakout sessions seriously at FOSS United events in the future. For instance, at IndiaFOSS 2026. Members of the Indian FOSS ecosystem regularly feel outraged at the state of FOSS adoption in India, at the roadblocks that exist and continue to be added to adopt FOSS in institutions, and more. But as a community, we need to move beyond outrage and towards action. But most of us don’t seem to know how to channel our outrage into meaningful discourse and change (at least I didn’t).
Defining a problem clearly, bringing together a diverse group of participants, enabling them with different mental models to help them analyse the problem, and expecting them to discuss, agree upon, and share recommendations seems to create a strong sense of agency. Our observations and the recommendations from our group might go into the void, but I learnt a lot engaging with this group of people and it changed my thinking for the better.