Prometheus Protocol: A civic rehearsal for the AI age
About this session: Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity. We all know how that ended for him. AI is today's fire: transformative, contested, and already reshaping economies, public discourse, and democratic life faster than our collective capacity to govern it. The governance window is still open, but it's narrowing.
This session is a civic rehearsal: a theatre-inspired, embodied experience where you don't just discuss AI's future, you step into it. Through staged scenes, physical positioning, and small-group co-creation, participants inhabit the real dilemmas of the AI political economy: who wields the power, who bears the risk, and where collective actors still have room to move. You will leave with shared language, a map of civic leverage, and one concrete move you've committed to carry home.
Protocol design: Alexandra Stef (Collective Futures). Brought to life in collaboration with Sonja Miokovic (Tamarack Institute) and Vinzenz Himmighofen (iac Berlin).
Alexandra Stef, Collective Futures, designs open source protocols and live experiments for collective agency. The Prometheus Protocol is the first in a suite of civic rehearsals being prototyped and designed to travel freely across contexts and scales.
Sonja Miokovic, Tamarack Institute is a social innovator and facilitator who designs and leads collaborative processes that help communities, organizations, and funders make sense of complexity and drive meaningful, place-based change.
Vinzenz Himmighofen, iac Berlin advances trust-based philanthropy by supporting coalition-building processes and helping organizations design and implement networked, collaborative approaches to achieve meaningful impact.
All three are part of the Wasan Network—a global community of social impact and philanthropy practitioners who believe that relationships sit at the center of meaningful social change.
Who this is for: Citizens, philanthropy leaders, civic innovators, public entrepreneurs, movement organisers, and funders grappling with AI power concentration and curious about what democratic alternatives might actually look like in practice.
What you will get out of it:
A visceral sense of the civic stakes in AI governance, not just an intellectual one
Shared language for navigating power concentration, oligopoly lock-in, and "no other choice" traps
A map of real civic leverage points: procurement, data cooperatives, public alternatives, narrative shift
At least one person to keep the conversation going with and one move to take back to your network
After the session: we're inviting anyone who wants to stay for an optional 30-minute debrief. This is the first public prototype of the Prometheus Protocol, a format designed to travel and evolve.
Your reactions, questions, and challenges are part of what makes the next iteration better. Come help us design what this becomes.
Location & access
Accessibility matters deeply to us, and we do our best to choose spaces that reflect that. That said, some of our Oxford venues are in historic buildings without lifts. This room is unfortunately not accessible for wheelchair users, those with mobility challenges, or anyone needing step-free access.