For the last year this has been an ITL project to build AI capability across the university. The feedback over the past year has been really encouraging. However I'm now finishing my ITL fellowship in order to take up a role as Associate Dean for Digital Education in Humanities from August. This creates a question about the future of the AI Commons.

There are a few options I see:

a) It becomes a Humanities initiative more focused on the disciplinary communities within our Faculty, though it could still welcome participation from colleagues in other Faculties.

b) I attempt to recruit an editorial team to keep it running in its university-wide form. If anyone would be interested in this please let me know. It wouldn't be a huge amount of work, particularly if it was shared between a few people.

c) We set up an internal mailing list or Teams space through which colleagues interested in these issues can keep in communication with each other.

There's an inherent tension between two ambitions. The first was to network those colleagues across the university who have been at the cutting-edge of exploring the implications of generative AI for what we do at the university. The second was to provide easy-to-access professional development so that colleagues could engage with these rapid developments through reading a newsletter every fortnight. My sense is that the decision about what comes next will involve leaning into one of those objectives rather than trying to do both.

I'd really value input on this. What has worked for you about the AI Commons? What would you want to see continue? Are there possibilities I haven't identified? I'd appreciate hearing from you over the next couple of weeks as I think this through before my leave in mid-July. Feel free to contact me directly at [email protected] or respond directly to this message."