We Build AI: Participatory Framework for Algorithmic Governance

Algorithms increasingly govern societal functions, impacting multiple stakeholders and social groups. How can we design these algorithms to balance varying interests in a moral, legitimate way? As one answer to this question, this paper presents WeBuildAI, a collective participatory framework that enables people to build algorithmic policy for their communities. The key idea of the framework is to enable stakeholders to construct a computational model that represents their views and to have those models vote on their behalf to create algorithmic policy. Drawing on an applied case study, the paper finds WeBuildAI successfully enabled participants to build models that they felt confident represented their own beliefs. Participatory algorithm design also improved both procedural fairness and the distributive outcomes of the algorithm, raised participants' algorithmic awareness, and helped identify inconsistencies in human decision-making in the governing organisation.