Seminar: DTPR for AI, a standard for making AI legible to everyone (with Jackie Lu and Jonathan Pichot)
This seminar will feature Jackie Lu and Jonathan Pichot from Helpful Places, to present their work stewarding and developing the open standard Digital Trust for Places & Routines (DTPR).
AI is being deployed in the places we live and move through, but the documents meant to explain it (model cards, algorithmic impact assessments, agency disclosures) are dense, technical, and written for experts. The people these systems are actually used on are left out of the conversation.
DTPR for AI is a new legibility standard that acts as a translation layer between the technical documents produced by model makers and government agencies, and the public. It makes AI legible by visually centering the questions people actually ask: What is this system doing? Who’s accountable for it? Does it use my personal data? What are my rights?
The DTPR standard bundles five integration surfaces so an AI agent, a web client, a server-side renderer, or an authoring team using Agent Skills can describe AI systems and the data they collect with a shared vocabulary.
In the seminar, Jackie will walk us through how the standard makes AI legible and why it matters:
AI as verbs, not jargon: describing a system as sensing, understanding, deciding, creating, acting, or moving instead of just “AI”
A shared visual language: how DTPR’s icons, color, and layout turn a complex system into a legible flow of data and responsibility
Naming real risks: mapping harms to actual impacts on people, using the AIAAIC harms taxonomy
The standard in action: how we translated Canada’s AI Register and NYC’s Algorithmic Tool Report into DTPR for AI
What’s next: canvases, workshop cards, and using DTPR to help communities decide what AI they’ll accept
Come with your questions — there’ll be time for discussion.
More about Metagov Seminar: The Metagov Seminar invites individuals working in online governance to present their work to a community of other researchers and practitioners. Seminar topics include, but are not limited to, computational tools for governance, governance incidents and case studies from online communities, topics in cryptoeconomics, and the design of digital constitutions.
The seminar is intended for researchers and practitioners in online governance, broadly defined. We welcome guests and curious members of the public. Note that the discussion is moderated.