A DRAFT FOR DISCUSSION
Monday, March 13, 7 p.m.
NO REGISTRATION REQUIRED
An Invitation to Build the
‘Civic Learning Collaborative’
Extended by Dan Forbush, Bill Walker and Jason Tepper
To the Content Creators Below
Academy for Lifelong Learning
Business for Good
Climate Smart Task Force
Friends of the Saratoga Springs Public Library
John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative
Friends of the Saratoga Springs Public Library
Pitney Meadows Community Farm
Saratoga Book Festival
Saratoga County League of Women Voters
Saratoga Civic Pulse
Saratoga County History Center
Saratoga Springs History Museum
Saratoga Springs Preservation Foundation
Saratoga Civic Pulse
Saratoga Dispatch
Saratoga Senior Center
Saratoga Torch Club
Saratoga Springs Preservation Foundation
Skidmore College Career Development Center
Skidmore College Encore Program
Our Opportunity
Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming how we produce, circulate, and rely on knowledge. The challenge now is not finding information, but making sense of it.
When communities take their own expertise seriously and make it accessible to others, they build something durable: a shared foundation for understanding. That foundation supports better choices, more informed participation, and a deeper, more resilient form of democratic life.
An Early Schematic as
ChatGPT Envisions It
Putting Smartacus to Work
The Smartacus Story Accelerator is a suite of AI tools designed to convert expert conversations into structured civic knowledge. Our process combines deep searches in ChatGPT, “civic conversations” hosted in Zoom and transcribed in Otter, transcripts uploaded and aggregated with up to 300 other sources in NotebookLM, ChatGPT’s reworking of content extracted from NotebookLM, and, finally, a close review and sign off by the experts who are giving us permission to efficiently “mine” and publish their knowledge.
You make me sound smarter than I really am. We often hear this from experts when we share our drafts. That’s because we augment our interview with additional verified sources that we have loaded into a remarkable Google tool called NotebookLM. This includes articles and book chapters the expert has written or interviews published. We’re effectively expanding the expert's own memory.
Supporting Community Dialog
Hosted with the Saratoga Torch Club in monthly gatherings over dinner and in weekly meetings in Zoom, Civic Conversations brings together local leaders, experts, and engaged citizens for thoughtful, exchanges that value curiosity, lived experience, and collective reasoning.
With our AI tools, we capture and refine these conversations, mining the knowledge of participating experts and transforming it into publishable civic media—articles, audio, and narrative features that extend each dialogue beyond the moment. The result is a growing body of shared understanding that not only reflects the community’s thinking but helps guide it.
Supporting Heritage Tourism
Combining our AI tools with STQRY, a platform that supports GPS-triggered self-guided audio tours on smartphones, we’ve achieved remarkable efficiencies in spatial storytelling. Visitors experience history as they move through the landscape.
Aiming to develop a new generation of spatial storytellers, we’ll soon begin interviewing Skidmore students who would like to join us this summer in producing tours for Voices of Saratoga.
To research these tours, we host conversations with experts on Saratoga history in Zoom and invite members of the Saratoga Torch Club and Academy for Lifelong Learning to join us. With the experts’ review and signoff, we publish magazine-length features on Stories from Open Space.
Watching the Rise of AI
AI at Work offers a shared platform where all who are exploring AI can place hands on the elephant and compare notes on what we’re feeling. In a moment defined as much by uncertainty as by possibility, this work is about making sense of the whole by listening carefully to each partial view.
Along the way, we’re surfacing the most inventive AI applications that Saratogians are developing in the public interest—projects that illuminate what’s possible when curiosity meets purpose. Just as important, we’ll report on the most consequential conversations unfolding about AI: where it’s taking us, how it’s changing the nature of work and knowledge, and what it asks of us as citizens.