The loose format of this workshop:
- 20 minutes - Brief talk on Community Infrastructure for Privacy, Agency, and Consent, including a brief introduction, overview, and real-world examples of physical and digital community infrastructure.
- 10 minutes - Group intros: Those attending the workshop can introduce themselves to the rest of the group and meet one another.
- 15 minutes - Speculative design exercise: Attendees form small groups and come up with a design for a community tool or infrastructure component they'd like to see exist for a community they lead or work with.
- 10 minutes - Lightning presentations: People present their designs from the exercise to one another.
(+ 5 minute buffer)

For more context on this topic, see post + talk slides here: https://www.emergentresearch.net/blog/community-infrastructure-for-privacy-agency-and-consent

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This workshop explores the questions: How can physical and digital infrastructure for community privacy, agency, and consent co-inform one another? How can infrastructure be co-designed by and with communities to be equitable, accessible, and effective?

Public infrastructure can refer to infrastructure that benefits the public that is funded and governed by the state, e.g. public goods; physical infrastructure (libraries, parks, roads, schools, transit); and digital infrastructure (civic tech, public datasets, digital ID systems - for better or worse). Public infrastructure, by design, relies on the state. When trust in the state exists: legibility to the state benefits common people, citizens expect their interests to be represented and addressed, and public infrastructure benefits citizen needs and wants. For example, Taiwan developed policies directly from community input and citizen dialogue for regulating Uber as well as non-consensual deepfakes via participatory, deliberative processes.

However, when trust is lacking between the state and its constituents, there exists risks of surveillance, policing, displacement, and other forms of disenfranchisement. Illegibility from the state can even serve as protection, such as for sex workers, immigrants, abortion seekers, transgender people, the unhoused, and more. Thus, many communities rely on creating and maintaining their own community infrastructure. Examples include mutual aid networks, community care, coops, community land trusts, and groups such as the Black Panther Party or the Young Lords who created their own programs for free childcare, free lunch programs, and free community health clinics. Digital community infrastructure may encompass local or self-hosting, federated or decentralized tech, and community-governed data collectives.

In addition to existing examples, we'll explore a few ideas for what could exist -- such as privacy infrastructure for vulnerable communities, consent-based data collectives, and collective data action frameworks, such as data strikes, data labor unions, and coordinated platform migrations -- to set us up to brainstorm and co-design our own community infrastructures.