We believe that participatory workshops have the power to help bridge gaps and silos among algorithmic accountability practitioners.

We co-create unique experiences that empower meaningful cross-disciplinary participation.

During our first year (2021-2022), we co-designed two unique workshop formats.

(1) We built our MVP of three case study based workshops. They each centered case studies of impactful actions we find worth examining for algorithmic accountability practitioners: Twitter’s 2021 Bias Bounty, and the case of a Frye Motion involving ShotSpotter in Illinois courts. We used facilitation techniques inspired by Open Post Academics’ participatory cross-disciplinary workshops, by speculative design, and by community led storytelling. These workshops each culminated in group reflection on shared insights.

(2) We also built workshops around our own exploratory research data. From December 2021 to March 2022, ACL conducted research on algorithmic accountability practitioners through interviews and a survey. We wanted to see if we could design participatory workshops that invite participants of different background to collaborate on insights about qualitative interview and quantitative survey data. This resulted in two workshops including one at MozFest.

We also conduct research on challenges and pathways for increasing accountability for AI systems.


Our founder and director is Borhane Blili-Hamelin.

We are currently hosted within Open Post Academics, which provides us with Zoom support, and with fiscal sponsorship status. We are currently a fiscally sponsored 501(c)(3) project of the Open Collective Foundation.

We were selected to be part of the first cohort of the MozFest Civil Society Actors for Trustworthy AI in 2021-2022.

We held two workshops at Mozilla Festival 2022, and one at RightsCon 2022.

We are committed to openness. We strive to release all our outputs under CC BY 4.0 attribution licenses.

Over time, we hope to turn this website into a resource for people interested in remixing and adapting our insights!

You can read a detailed overview of our activities during our first year on the document linked here.

To stay tuned about our next steps and our Fall 2022 workshops, sign up for our mailing list here.

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Accountability Case Labs