Week 10
2nd March 2026 to 8th March 2026
Monday 2nd March 2026
AI Ethics WG
Type of meeting: Monthly
Present: CallyFromAuron [facilitator], CallyFromAuron [documenter], CallyFromAuron, PeterE, LadyTempestt, AshleyDawn, omolola, UKnowZork, Alfred Itodele, MaxMilez, CollyPride
Purpose: Monthly meeting of the AI Ethics Workgroup
Narrative:
Q1 2026 transcription tasks
Deadline for completion was last Friday, and there are 3 tasks outstanding. Rems commented in her GitHub issue that she will complete hers by next Monday (9th Mwrch). The other issues had no comments, so Alfred's was reassigned to MaxMilez, and Grandi's to Ashley, with a due date of Fri 27th March.
Transcript checking - as mentioned last meeting, token price is now so low that (at approx £13 sterling for several hours' work) it is no longer viable for Vani to do transcript checking via the WG budget.
After the end of this Quarter the WG will be unlikely to assign any further transcription or transcript checking tasks. BGI Nexus is looking into how to fund outstanding transcription, as it would be useful to get the whole corpus transcribed.
The money we had earmarked for transcript-checking this Quarter (1,000 AGIX) could be transferred to the task of drafting ideas for articles about the research. TBC.
Writing up research conclusions
If we transfer 1,000 AGIX from transcript-checking to this task, giving a total of 1,500 AGIX, we would be able to pay 3 people 500 AGIX each to look through the interview materials and identify possible themes that could be written up. Vani will be copying all anonymised material into one folder to enable this. Lola, Love and Ashley have expressed interest. Vani and Esther discussed the actual writing process - it feels like somehing that could be approached via BGI Nexus's working groups. There are several people involved who have academic writing experience, so we are envisaging small groups of 3 or 4 people - including the WG member who identified the theme - collaborating to write pieces and to give some writing mentorship to WG members. This might not happen as soon as Q2, but it would nevertheless be useful to have the article ideas in place as soon as we can.
Admin roles
Most of the Quarter's work for the 3 admin roles is now complete (other than submission of a brief report in the Governance Dashboard on how budget was spent). We will send these tasks for payment next week.
Future of the Workgroup
BGI Nexus's research work is now entering a new phase (coding results and publishing insights), so Esther and Vani are suggesting that we will not be assigning any further interviewing or transcription work via the WG.
In the light of the Ambassador program restructure, Vani suggested that perhaps there is no need for an AI Ethics WG as such in future; and perhaps our work should continue by incorporating some kind of "ethical oversight" role into any project-based work that the Program does.
However, several people were reluctant to disband the workgroup completely, since they are still gaining value from doing tasks and learning skills, and since ethics is a central element of everything we do as a Program, and the WG is a way to focus this.
Ideas for future work that were suggested in the meeting included running discussion events on AI ethics topics, or working on developing some kind of ethics accountability protocol that projects across the whole ecosystem should align with (On this, though, we noted that this overlaps with a BGI Nexus working group which is devising a safety and ethics framework; although this is voluntary work). Possibly, we could propose either of these 2 things via the new "offernet"-style approach that the Foundation will be setting up - there will be room for work proposed by the community.
Given the sentiment in favour of not completely disbanding, we agreed we will meet as usual in April (Mon 6th April, 14:00 UTC) just as a check-in, and without any admin budget. At that point, various elemens of the Program restructure will be clearer, and we can discuss how to proceed in the longer term. Meanwhile, members are encouraged to give ideas in the WG planning spreadsheet for a) topics for discussion sessions and b) any ideas for ethical audit processes, and how to include ethical oversight in project planning.
Decision Items:
We will meet in April just as a check-in with no budget (by which time the restructure should be clearer) and consider the future of the WG
[rationale] People are interested in maintaining the WG because they are still learning from being part of it, and because ethics is central to the Ambassador Program's work and it would be useful to have a place to focus on it.
[opposing] Not an opposing argument as such, but depending on how far the Ambassador Program transitions to project-based work, perhaps our role would be more about ensuring an element of ethics oversight or audit in Ambassador Program projects, rather then continuing to meet as a WG as such after April.
[effect] mayAffectOtherPeople
Before our April meeting, we agreed to collate ideas on possible topics for ethics-related discussion sessions...
[rationale] with a view to seeing whether these can be proposed as small projects to be funded via the Foundation's "offernet" approach.
[effect] mayAffectOtherPeople
Action Items:
[action] Vani to copy all anonymised research material to a folder so that interested people can work on identifying topics for articles [assignee] LadyTempestt [due] 30 March 2026 [status] todo
Keywords/tags:
topics covered: interview transcription, low token price, BGI Nexus, research conclusions, future of the WG, Ambassador Program restructure, Foundation liaison, offernet, ethics discussion sessions, project-based work, ethical audit, etthical oversight
emotions: Discursive, thoughtful, forward-looking
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