Intentionality That Grows

How do you measure impact on a community? Economic growth with job opportunities, safer neighborhoods in terms of crime, social cohesion with neighbors knowing each other, and a unique thumbprint of an ecosystem that’s fully operational with everything it needs. Community impact is far harder to measure when it’s at large and online, and the impact we want to have is giving a voice, practical solutions, and understanding for how everyone is impacted by AI through a policy we created called the HART Standard. HART stands for Human Aligned Responsible Technology.

What we desire is a tall order, but good initiatives, especially grassroots initiatives like ours, start with people wanting to participate for the public good instead of barricading themselves against one another. We created a standard that is informed by the community, artists, developers, and government, all impacted by AI. Our main customers of the standard are the tech community and companies who adopt the standard to show they have made considerations in their products and services for human livelihoods and creativity.

But we’re NOT hypothetical. Our programs at the nonprofit meet with people in the real world, and our standard also creates job opportunities for people who are currently not in tech. They say repeatedly that those who don’t learn AI will be left behind, but what we did, in addition to creating the standard for tech companies, is create the job role of Risk Context Officer, where the background of people in every industry becomes valued in our compliance curriculums and with our external certifiers.

Dreaming big means nothing without execution and bringing to the table the decision makers and people actually left behind. And that’s why funds towards community engagements and creating job funnels that don’t already exist for people are important to us. With all of these in action, taking place in practice and not theory, we endeavor for communities to be seen and heard and to gain job opportunities alongside tech that value their unique attributes.

We are currently piloting our RCO role in San Francisco and PG County alongside workforce development programs, and we’ve had our AI standard vetted by big names in local AI circles, including Banjo Obajami. We are also pursuing institutional backing from the University of Maryland’s AIMS Center, whose representatives attended our public reveal.

All we need is funding to help get us physically in front of the community, consistently, and make an impact that can be felt locally while we grow outward. HART will measure its own success by job creation, participation of artists, including outreach to communities such as the 335,000 members of the Artists Against AI Facebook group, and the adoption of the HART Standard by tech companies and their subsequent certification.