CRAFT session at ACM FAccT

June 26, 2025

• CRAFT session: 15:15 - 16:15/16:45, Amphitheatre Ioannis Despotopoulos (1F), Athens Conservatoire, Athens, Greece
• Social: 18:30 - 20:30, OROSCOPO restaurant, Antinoros 42-44, Athina 161 21 (12 minutes on foot from the Conservatoire)

Sign up for the CRAFT session and/or Social

Overview

As a relatively new venue, FAccT has brought together academics, activists, and policymakers to critically interrogate the societal implications of AI/ML technologies. To reflect on how well the conference meets these goals, we are organizing a participatory session that invites attendees to surface key questions and concerns through a bottom-up process. Using methods from participatory design, the session will create space for collective reflection on experiences, expectations, and visions for FAccT.

Building on prior work like Laufer et al. (2022), which analyzed FAccT’s scholarly output, this session centers around eliciting direct community input. Participants will generate statements about the conference’s role, impact, and future direction, which will be shared and voted on interactively through the Polis platform. While initial discussion and voting will take place during the session, the process will continue for another week via the conference Slack channel.

The session will begin with a brief overview of participatory design practices to frame the value and goals of this session. In small groups, participants will surface key questions and themes about FAccT, generating seed statements to kick off broader conversations. We will aim to close with early insights from the session.

Participation

To use Polis effectively, it is highly recommended to bring a laptop or similar electronic devices with typing functionality. Additionally, some activities may involve writing on paper. We will provide writing pads, but please remember to bring the pen included in your FAccT tote bag.

Outline

• Welcome and introduction to participatory design (10 min)
• Breakout groups for seed statements (15 min)
• Break (5 min)
• Participation on Polis (15 min)
• Preliminary Results (10 min)

Organizers

Shiran Dudy (Northeastern University)

Yanan Long (Queer in AI & University of Chicago)

Jan Simson (LMU Munich)