Co-Building the Future: AI Alignment for Open Source Communities
MCLD 3002 | Sat 08 Aug 10:45 a.m.–11:30 a.m.
Presented by
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Emma Irwin
@sunnydeveloper.mastodon.social
@NA
https://sunnydeveloper.com
Emma Irwin is founder and principal consultant at Open Practice Consulting and co-chairs the CHAOSS AI Aligment for Open Source Working Group. She has worked at the intersection of openness, source, education, science and data for over 20 years, including roles with Mozilla's Open Innovation Team, Microsoft's Open Source Programs Office, and Royal Roads University. Emma co-chairs the CHAOSS AI Alignment for Open Source Working Group.
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Justin Wheeler
https://jwheel.org
Justin Wheeler is a Free Software activist and Open Source maintainer with a passion for the human health and well-being of the communities around the code. Justin currently works at Red Hat as the Community Architect for the Fedora Project. In this role, Justin participates as a member of the Fedora Council, stewarding the Fedora community budget from Red Hat, and organizing the annual Flock to Fedora conference. Among many other things too.
With over a decade of experience in Open Source, Justin often works in fast-moving, innovative organizations and communities. For nearly a decade, he participates in the CHAOSS project and community. He was part of a Ford Foundation research cohort in 2021–2022 and contributed to the DEI Working Group. Presently, he is a co-chair of the CHAOSS AI Alignment Working Group.
Justin also has a connection and appreciation for collaboration and innovation in the public sector. This was honed during his years working with the UNICEF Office of Innovation, supporting the UNICEF Venture Fund. While at UNICEF, Justin designed and executed a guided twelve-month Open Source mentorship program for diverse start-up companies from around the world. Together with a team of mentors, Justin mentored twenty-three start-up companies from nineteen countries and five continents. Of these companies, fourteen achieved global recognition as Digital Public Goods and three were acquired in multi-million dollar acquisitions.
As a Fedora community member since 2015, Justin has played an influential role in shaping its direction. He is an advocate for DEI and co-founded the Fedora DEI Team in 2016. He also co-founded the Fedora Community Ops team to help drive greater collaboration among remote, asynchronous teams. In 2022, he was a driving force for helping Fedora earn its own global recognition as a Digital Public Good. Additionally, Justin often travels either as a speaker or representative of the community at various events.
You may find Justin on the speaker track at various conferences. He has appeared earliest at All Things Open (Raleigh, NC, USA) and DevConf CZ (Brno, Czechia) when he shared his experience as a student studying and contributing to Free Software. Later, Justin would go on to speak about measuring healthy communities at CHAOSScon EU and ethical AI systems in Open Source communities together with Mike Nolan at the FOSDEM conference (Brussels, Belgium). However, his favorite events are ones like Open Source Conference Albania (Tirana, Albania) and the double OS Community Africa Festival + CHAOSScon Africa conferences (Lagos, Nigeria). Experiencing the emergent enthusiasm for Free Software in new contexts and getting to participate in the evolution of the culture is what renews the fight for Software Freedom.
Additionally, Justin also is a current or past contributor of other Open Source projects, such as SpigotMC, Opensource.com, MusicBrainz, and Wikipedia. He is also an avid traveler and sets a personal goal to learn something new from the places he visits and the people he meets.
Emma Irwin
@sunnydeveloper.mastodon.social
@NA
https://sunnydeveloper.com
Emma Irwin is founder and principal consultant at Open Practice Consulting and co-chairs the CHAOSS AI Aligment for Open Source Working Group. She has worked at the intersection of openness, source, education, science and data for over 20 years, including roles with Mozilla's Open Innovation Team, Microsoft's Open Source Programs Office, and Royal Roads University. Emma co-chairs the CHAOSS AI Alignment for Open Source Working Group.
Justin Wheeler
https://jwheel.org
Justin Wheeler is a Free Software activist and Open Source maintainer with a passion for the human health and well-being of the communities around the code. Justin currently works at Red Hat as the Community Architect for the Fedora Project. In this role, Justin participates as a member of the Fedora Council, stewarding the Fedora community budget from Red Hat, and organizing the annual Flock to Fedora conference. Among many other things too.
With over a decade of experience in Open Source, Justin often works in fast-moving, innovative organizations and communities. For nearly a decade, he participates in the CHAOSS project and community. He was part of a Ford Foundation research cohort in 2021–2022 and contributed to the DEI Working Group. Presently, he is a co-chair of the CHAOSS AI Alignment Working Group.
Justin also has a connection and appreciation for collaboration and innovation in the public sector. This was honed during his years working with the UNICEF Office of Innovation, supporting the UNICEF Venture Fund. While at UNICEF, Justin designed and executed a guided twelve-month Open Source mentorship program for diverse start-up companies from around the world. Together with a team of mentors, Justin mentored twenty-three start-up companies from nineteen countries and five continents. Of these companies, fourteen achieved global recognition as Digital Public Goods and three were acquired in multi-million dollar acquisitions.
As a Fedora community member since 2015, Justin has played an influential role in shaping its direction. He is an advocate for DEI and co-founded the Fedora DEI Team in 2016. He also co-founded the Fedora Community Ops team to help drive greater collaboration among remote, asynchronous teams. In 2022, he was a driving force for helping Fedora earn its own global recognition as a Digital Public Good. Additionally, Justin often travels either as a speaker or representative of the community at various events.
You may find Justin on the speaker track at various conferences. He has appeared earliest at All Things Open (Raleigh, NC, USA) and DevConf CZ (Brno, Czechia) when he shared his experience as a student studying and contributing to Free Software. Later, Justin would go on to speak about measuring healthy communities at CHAOSScon EU and ethical AI systems in Open Source communities together with Mike Nolan at the FOSDEM conference (Brussels, Belgium). However, his favorite events are ones like Open Source Conference Albania (Tirana, Albania) and the double OS Community Africa Festival + CHAOSScon Africa conferences (Lagos, Nigeria). Experiencing the emergent enthusiasm for Free Software in new contexts and getting to participate in the evolution of the culture is what renews the fight for Software Freedom.
Additionally, Justin also is a current or past contributor of other Open Source projects, such as SpigotMC, Opensource.com, MusicBrainz, and Wikipedia. He is also an avid traveler and sets a personal goal to learn something new from the places he visits and the people he meets.
Abstract
AI is possible because open communities have collaborated and shared openly licensed code and content. AI models are dependent on thousands of open source projects to function, and have relied on countless open resources to obtain the level of intelligence we see today. One might even say that without access to openly licensed code and content, AI would lack the context of humanity altogether. Communities are on the defensive: reactively creating policies around how AI may, if at all, interact with humans or the output of their labour. We've also seen (among other reactive approaches) projects change licenses, communities change platforms, bug bounty programs shut down, policies ban AI contributions, and writers add subscription barriers to combat the unknown.
"In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), alignment aims to steer AI systems toward a person's or group's intended goals, preferences, or ethical principles. An AI system is considered aligned if it advances the intended objectives. A misaligned AI system pursues unintended objectives." - AI Alignment, Wikipedia
The CHAOSS AI Alignment for Open Source Working Group (under the Linux Foundation) is a cross-community collaboration of practitioners working to define and build solutions that give power back to communities by providing tools and metrics to help communities move from objects of consumption to owners and facilitators of their future. In this talk, we will share efforts to define "what success looks like" for AI alignment with open communities around use, consent, embedded feedback, and detection. Specifically, we will cover:
- Metric: AI Use + Consent (declaration). A metric focused on evaluating AI use and adherence to community policies.
- Metric: AI Community Feedback (measurement). A metric model that focuses on whether feedback to providers produces observable change, at what cost, and whether the exchange is proportional to the effort.
- Tool: CHAOSS AI Detection Action (inform/enable enforcement). Communities verify what is happening. The tool surfaces AI-authored or AI-assisted contributions from commit-level signals, including AI tool type and declared use.
As Shannon Vallor writes in The AI Mirror (which focuses on ethics + AI), these systems "show only where the data say that we have already been, never where we might venture together for the first time." AI reflects our creative and imperfect pasts. We hope this work can help us forge a more optimistic future with communities in the driver's seat.
AI is possible because open communities have collaborated and shared openly licensed code and content. AI models are dependent on thousands of open source projects to function, and have relied on countless open resources to obtain the level of intelligence we see today. One might even say that without access to openly licensed code and content, AI would lack the context of humanity altogether. Communities are on the defensive: reactively creating policies around how AI may, if at all, interact with humans or the output of their labour. We've also seen (among other reactive approaches) projects change licenses, communities change platforms, bug bounty programs shut down, policies ban AI contributions, and writers add subscription barriers to combat the unknown.
"In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), alignment aims to steer AI systems toward a person's or group's intended goals, preferences, or ethical principles. An AI system is considered aligned if it advances the intended objectives. A misaligned AI system pursues unintended objectives." - AI Alignment, Wikipedia
The CHAOSS AI Alignment for Open Source Working Group (under the Linux Foundation) is a cross-community collaboration of practitioners working to define and build solutions that give power back to communities by providing tools and metrics to help communities move from objects of consumption to owners and facilitators of their future. In this talk, we will share efforts to define "what success looks like" for AI alignment with open communities around use, consent, embedded feedback, and detection. Specifically, we will cover:
- Metric: AI Use + Consent (declaration). A metric focused on evaluating AI use and adherence to community policies.
- Metric: AI Community Feedback (measurement). A metric model that focuses on whether feedback to providers produces observable change, at what cost, and whether the exchange is proportional to the effort.
- Tool: CHAOSS AI Detection Action (inform/enable enforcement). Communities verify what is happening. The tool surfaces AI-authored or AI-assisted contributions from commit-level signals, including AI tool type and declared use.
As Shannon Vallor writes in The AI Mirror (which focuses on ethics + AI), these systems "show only where the data say that we have already been, never where we might venture together for the first time." AI reflects our creative and imperfect pasts. We hope this work can help us forge a more optimistic future with communities in the driver's seat.