Civic tech/Civic AI at the Dukakis Center
The Dukakis Center at ACT has been organizing events dedicated to civic tech and, now, civic AI, for two decades.
The Director of the Center has a long-standing interest in civic-tech, having taught a pilot hybrid senior seminar on e-democracy via Blackboard in 2004, and has subsequently written and lectured broadly on the subject and attended events like the Internet Governance Forum. Indeed, In matters of technology Dr. Wisner has pioneered the use at ACT of various platforms, formats, tools, and approaches to event planning and management, has animated a series of events on business and technology, and maintains a research profile in technology and democracy.
Under Dr. Wisner’s direction, the Dukakis Center has hosted multiple speakers and events with a focus on civic technology. The late Jim McGann of the University of Pennsylvania delivered the keynote lecture on AI and civil society in May 2019 at our think tank summit at Public Syntagma in Athens, “Gatekeepers of Democracy.” Before that, Victoria Alsina of GovLab (NYU) and the Ash Center (Harvard), who delivered the keynote lecture at the Reworks Agora 2018, "Blockchain: Grassroots initiatives for democracy." The Dukakis Center helped bring Epaminondas Christofilopoulos’ work into the public eye when we hosted his talk on “AI and the Future of Work” at Reworks 2019.
In May 2020 the Center was to have hosted, live from Taipei via holographic projection, Audrey Tang, Digital Minister for Taiwan, for a talk on the future of democracy. More recently, Beth Simone Noveck of Northeastern University (formerly White House Deputy Chief Technology Officer under President Obama) spoke at the Center’s 2022 Civil Society Forum, while Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody (2008) and Vice Provost for AI and Technology in Education at New York University, spoke under the Dukakis Center banner at Beyond 2025 in Athens, at a session entitled “AI, social contracts, and digital literacy.”
Our next forays in the field will take place during the 2025-26 academic year amid heightened awareness of and concern over the future of artificial intelligence. The Center will host a one-off event on Civic AI with a local partner for a select audience in Thessaloniki, and a discussion session on the same topic at next year's Beyond forum (Athens, June 2026). Among others, the Dukakis Center will invite the conveners of this year’s TICTeC “Impacts of Civic Technology” conference in Mechelen, Belgium.
