# "Taking Stock at FAccT": Using Participatory Design to Co-Create a Vision for the Fairness, Accountability and Transparency Community

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.16224 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16224/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Power to the People? Opportunities and Challenges for Participatory AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07572/) (2022)
- [Collective Constitutional AI: Aligning a Language Model with Public Input](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07814/) (2024)
- [Participation is not a Design Fix for Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02423/) (2020)
- [The Participatory Turn in AI Design: Theoretical Foundations and the Current State of Practice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00907/) (2023)
- [Opportunities and Risks of LLMs for Scalable Deliberation with Polis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11932/) (2023)
- [Queer In AI: A Case Study in Community-Led Participatory AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16972/) (2023)
- [WEIRD FAccTs: How Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic is FAccT?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06415/) (2023)
- [Four Years of FAccT: A Reflexive, Mixed-Methods Analysis of Research Contributions, Shortcomings, and Future Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06738/) (2022)
- ["Ownership, Not Just Happy Talk": Co-Designing a Participatory Large Language Model for Journalism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17299/) (2025)
- [Participatory design: A systematic review and insights for future practice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17952/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As a relatively new forum, ACM FAccT has become a key space for activists and scholars to critically examine emerging AI and ML technologies. It brings together academics, civil society members, and government representatives from diverse fields to explore the broader societal impacts of both deployed and proposed technologies. We report a large-scale participatory design (PD) process for reflexive conference governance, which combined an in-person CRAFT session, an asynchronous Polis poll and the synthesis of a governance-facing report for the FAccT leadership. Participants shaped the substantive agenda by authoring seed statements, adding new statements and making patterns of agreement, disagreement and uncertainty made visible through voting.Our endeavors represent one of the the first instances of applying PD to a venue that critically interrogates the societal impacts of AI, fostering a niche in which critical scholars are free to voice their concerns. Finally, this work advances large-scale PD theory by providing an effective case study of a co-design paradigm that can readily scale temporally and epistemologically.