Day 1, Wednesday, May 20th
9:00am - 9:30am Welcome

Doors Open; Check In & Coffee
9:30am - 10:00am Welcome

Welcome to MakeShift

Jacqueline Lu, Georgia Bullen, Adriana Valdez Young

Digital systems are reshaping public life faster than our ability to make sense of them - from the algorithms shaping school placements to the AI answering for your city. And yet the conversations about accountability, trust, and community agency over these systems are still happening in silos: technologists in one room, policymakers in another, communities rarely in either.

MakeShift is an experiment to see what happens when you bring those rooms together and ask the question - how might we design for more accountable technology? In this opening session, the hosts will share the story of how this event came about, and their thoughts on why the urgency of this moment demanded something messier, more human, and more collaborative than a traditional conference.

Our hope is to see what potential can be unlocked when designers, technologists, researchers, and advocates are put in the same room to build together.
10:00am - 10:50am Plenary

From Tools to Civic Infrastructure: Centering Community Expertise for More Accountable AI

Meg Young, Jake Hirsch-Allen, Jacqueline Lu Moderator: Dr. Pamela Robinson

A growing movement argues that AI deployed in the public interest must be built as public infrastructure - with public access, public accountability, and permanence as a public good. But what does accountability *actually look like* in practice? Who participates, at what stage, and through what mechanisms?

This panel brings together researchers and practitioners working on different pieces of this puzzle. From the Public AI Network's vision for AI as civic infrastructure, to Data & Society's pioneering work on community-based algorithmic impact assessment, to the DTPR open standard deployed in 15+ cities as a "legibility layer" for urban AI, to a live Canadian project building national consensus on AI interpretability - the panelists have each confronted the same core question from different angles: how do you give communities genuine agency over the AI systems that shape public life?

The conversation moves from vision to methods to infrastructure to norms, surfacing both what's working and where participatory approaches hit real limits.
11:00am - 12:30pm Plenary

Surface Tensions: Threatcasting The Augmented City

Greg Lindsay & Nick Kaufmann

As AI and XR converge across our streets, parks, and plazas, how do we navigate the threats they pose to public life? In this workshop, participants will apply the threatcasting foresight methodology to tell Black Mirror episodes lurking just over the horizon — identifying near-future risks to urban space, the early signals warning us they're arriving, and the interventions that might stop them. Later, we'll use those stories to imagine how to navigate the augmented public realm before it navigates us.
12:30pm - 1:30pm Break

Lunch and Networking Break
1:30pm - 1:45pm Plenary

Post-Lunch Synthesis
1:45pm - 2:15pm Plenary

DTPR For AI

Jonathan Pichot

Nutrition labels translate ingredients. Energy Stars translate efficiency. Pictograms warn us about chemicals. What about the algorithm watching you cross the street, the AI deciding your school placement, the chatbot answering for your city? In this plenary, Jonathan Pichot of Helpful Places introduces DTPR for AI: the open-source visual language and methodology that turns the growing patchwork of AI disclosures, from regulators, vendors, and researchers, into something anyone can read and understand. Building on years of work bringing transparency to data collection in public spaces, DTPR for AI extends the DTPR standard into the world of algorithms and AI with a new schema, an icon language, REST and MCP APIs, UI components, and an agent-skill that gets AI to describe AI. There will be a demo. There will be a launch. Expect a brick to build on.

2:15pm - 2:45pm

Plenary

Unlocking Vendor Transparency: The Non-Regulatory Toolkit

Center for Tech & Democracy (Hannah Quay-de la Vallee)

Government agencies often rely on vendors to provide the tools and technologies they use to run their operations and provide services to the public. Because of this, transparency efforts by agencies require transparency from vendors as well. This talk will cover what information agencies need from their vendors, and the tools they have available to get that information.
3:00pm - 4:30pm Breakout

Co-designing the Algorithm: Participatory Approaches to AI

Pinar Guvenc, Adriana Valdez Young

From content curation to automated decision-making, algorithmic systems have become ubiquitous in mediating human interactions. Their design directly shapes whether communities unite or divide, stay informed or fall behind, grow empowered or become dependent.These outcomes are not inevitable technical consequences but rather the results of the designed processes built-in AI life cycle stages. This workshop explores how participatory design can reshape AI development, shifting it into a catalyst for inclusive dialogue and knowledge sharing. Through presentations and structured co-ideation, participants will envision AI futures and identify practical actions they can embed in their day-to-day processes.

3:00pm - 4:30pm Breakout

SMOL GARDENS: Accountable AI for Civic Tech

Femmecubator (Krizia Fernando, Priyanka Thomas, Kris Rubiano)

The workshop begins with a short presentation on the Smol Gardens project. The talk will also focus on the current state of AI-enabled web design, a self-auditing impact framework, and small language models as a good alternative to LLMs. The workshop will introduce design principles and an approach to building civic tech grounded in continuous accountability to affected communities, transparency about tradeoffs, and openness to critique to strengthen community agency and democratic self-governance.

In the hands-on portion, participants will apply the framework by vibecoding a simple AI application using a small language model and evaluating its impact in three core areas: human and societal impact, future systems, and environmental responsibility. This workshop is for designers, builders and civic technologists who are already using AI tools in their work but feel caught between the pressure to move fast and the need to build responsibly.

Smol Gardens is an initiative by the Femmecubator team, introduced at BetaNYC's UnSchool of Data 2026 conference, and pitched as part of the Open Civic Tech initiative.
3:00pm - 4:00pm Breakout

The Physical Space is the Interface

Jeffrey Dungen

What if any physical space could simply tell you about the technologies present, their purpose, and what happens with the data? What if anyone could choose to receive this information through their preferred medium, any time they enter a physical space? This is perfectly possible today combining ubiquitous human-scale wireless technologies with DTPR. In this interactive talk, we’ll explore real-world implementations since 2012 in the form of open source projects that can be used as a starting point for novel initiatives where the physical space is the interface, embodying trust and transparency!

4:30pm - 8:00pm Plenary

Public Reception & Showcase
Day 2, Thursday, May 21st
9:00am - 9:30am Welcome

Doors Open: Check In & Coffee
9:30am - 9:45am Plenary

Learnings About the DTPR Ecosystem

Chelsea McCullough, PhD

The DTPR team has been hard at work this year speaking with community members, interviewing public service and industry leaders, and researching the state of the field to understand how to best position DTPR to meet this moment. During this session, we hope to share a bit of what we've learned, and what it means for DTPR going forward
9:45am - 10:45am Plenary

Soft Infrastructures & Undesigning Design

Panelists: Marco Zamarato, Pinar Guvenc, Adriana Valdez Young, Moderator: Georgia Bullen

The things we build today are rarely discrete products. They look more like entangled, distributed, and complex systems that escape the control of any single actor. And beneath the technical infrastructures sit softer ones: the mental models, language, and myths we use to make sense of a chaotic and prismatic world.

This panel explores the importance of soft infrastructures in creating the conditions for new and desirable solutions, and the need to rethink the designer's role and process for a different kind of material. An AI system is not a chair, a book, or an app, and the distance between us and what we are now building calls for different myths, different identities, and a different mix of humanities and sciences: from makers to stewards, facilitators, and system steerers.

Drawing on the panelists' varied work across design, technology, governance, and education, the conversation moves between concrete examples and the broader question of how design itself needs to change.
10:45am - 12:30pm Breakout

AI as Civic Infrastructure: Designing the Community Data Center

Megan Marini, Jamil Ellis, Zoe Voss Lee, Nepal Asatthawasi

As AI becomes embedded in civic life, the infrastructure behind it remains centralized and opaque. This hands-on workshop invites participants to design alternatives to the dominant narrative around data centers and AI. Using 3x3 and Unified Ground's community-centered AI framework, participants will work through a grounded scenario — a proposed data center in NYC’s Lower East Side — to explore how AI systems can be locally governed, accountable, and materially grounded. Working in small groups across infrastructure layers (data, energy, governance, and more), participants will surface the real tradeoffs required to build community-owned digital infrastructure.
10:45am - 12:30pm Breakout

Beyond Consultation: Designing Public Processes for Accountable Digital Systems

Daniel Fusca

This interactive workshop explores how public engagement on digital systems can move beyond traditional consultation through the use of deliberative approaches. After a short presentation, participants will work with real-world cases suggested by the group to identify where public input can shape decisions and how to design processes that help people understand and grapple with complexity and make informed recommendations. The session introduces a practical framework for applying deliberative principles to complex systems, advancing legibility, accountability, and trust to support more resilient decisions.

10:45am - 11:45am Breakout

You Tracked My What? Can responsive spaces show, not tell how they work?

Spatial Pixel (Violet Whitney, William Martin)

In responsive environments, accountability can’t rely only on signs, labels, or disclosures. People need to form a working mental model of the system through the behavior of the space itself: what it responds to, where its boundaries are, how cause and effect works, and how they can change it.

We explore how responsive environments can make themselves understandable through interaction rather than static disclosure alone. Using the Spatial Pixel Lab at SVA as a case study, the talk and demo asks how people form mental models of responsive environments. Can they see what the space senses? Can they understand cause and effect? Can they tell when a behavior starts and stops? Can they change the system without becoming programmers?

In a future where spaces can be authored in real time, the most trustworthy spaces may be those that teach people how they work.
12:30pm - 1:30pm Break

Lunch Break
1:45pm - 2:45pm Breakout

Designing the Receipts

Candice Walker

Join us for "Designing the Receipts," an interactive co-design workshop that moves community members from "data subjects" to Resident Auditors. In this session, participants use physical wireframe kits, complete with pre-printed "feature tiles" and paper phones, to co-create the UX/UI for a mobile platform that tracks real-time developer accountability. By grounding technical design in the "Anatomy of Erasure," we will collaboratively build an interface that makes community promises impossible to ignore.
1:45pm - 2:45pm Breakout

The Internet's Urban Planning Problem

Keelin Burke

Urban planning can make or break a city. What if we viewed digital design the same way? The shift from citizen to consumer didn't start with the internet, but digital design pushed it into overdrive. Algorithms and platform decisions are made entirely outside of public awareness, intentionally crafted to steer users below the threshold of awareness toward the most profitable experience. Dark patterns and an ever-expanding digital panopticon have quietly eroded political efficacy in ways we're only beginning to understand. Marketers and advertisers are calling a lot of these shots. And most don't fully understand the terms.

This session will explore the above and close with an open discussion. Participants will walk away with a deeper understanding of the relationship between digital design, consumerism, and political efficacy.

1:45pm - 2:45pm Breakout

T4T Technology

Namesake (Ky Decker)

For trans and gender-nonconforming people, updating a legal name and gender marker means navigating a bureaucratic process that can cost over $1,000, require a court appearance, a doctor’s letter, and a newspaper publication—all while managing the emotional weight of a shift in one’s core identity. Namesake is a trans-run non-profit building open source tools to help people navigate the name change process with clarity and care. This talk will cover how Namesake has evolved toward local-first technology that prioritizes accessibility and security, along with advice for building civic forms for vulnerable populations.
2:45pm - 3:00pm Break

Break
3:00pm - 4:00pm Breakout

Can ancient pattern-making wisdom guide how we build technology?

Lavannya Suressh

If technology optimizes everything, why does the world feel less beautiful? The hunger for beauty was more apparent in the past. Across cultures and centuries, pattern systems like Islamic interlace, Celtic knots, and Kolams each reflect distinct ways of translating meaning through repetition, symmetry, and rule-based systems into visual form. This session uses Kolams, a South Indian art form, to explore the algorithmic logic behind pattern systems. By recognizing cultural patterns as living systems of knowledge, we can engage with them as collaborators to extend their logic into new, expressive forms supporting a notion of technological progress that doesn't abandon beauty.
3:00pm - 4:00pm Breakout

DTPR for AI Workshop

Jonathan Pichot

Get hands-on with DTPR for AI. In this hour-long workshop, Jonathan Pichot walks you through installing the DTPR for AI agent skill on the AI agent of your choice, Claude, Gemini, OpenAI, or any other, and using it to turn an AI disclosure into a published, visual DTPR datachain. Come with a laptop and, if you have one, a disclosure of an AI system you'd like to describe: an algorithmic impact assessment, an AI register entry, a vendor spec, a privacy notice. We'll have examples on hand if you don't. Leave with your own working datachain, a contribution to the open AI-transparency commons, and an invitation to keep building.
4:00pm - 4:30pm Plenary

The Feedback Loop: How to contribute your community's conversation to shape DTPR

DTPR Team

The thing that sets DTPR apart is that its designed with the openness in mind. It is meant to be used, and added to by members of the public. During this session, we're going to share a few of the tools and strategies we've developed to help public needs and conversation improve the standard for everyone.

4:30pm - 5:00pm Plenary

So What, Now What?

Jasmine Palardy, Georgia Bullen and Jacqueline Lu

Two days of workshops, provocations, and hands-on making deserve more than a summary. This closing session will be a collaboration with everyone who has been at MakeShift - coming together to reflect on our shared experience here - and turning it into what happens next.