The New Commons

"AI will not replace humans. But humans with AI will replace humans without AI." — Karim Lakhani, The New World of Work, Harvard Business Review

In a Nutshell

The New Commons is an online, collaborative unconference where makers and producers set the agenda to explore how AI can free and enhance individual creativity.

Join the Experiment

AI systems give everyone with the same prompt a similar answer—a consensus built from highly competent training sources. As competence, once the scarce resource, becomes abundant, your judgement, taste, and ideas become the true differentiator.

The New Commons takes the form of a highly interactive, online Open Space gathering for practitioners navigating the practical intersection of human craft and emerging machine intelligence. Whether you are curious about programming with swarms of agents or how AI is shifting organisational power, you'll find people here actively working on both. But the real reason to come is that judgement sharpens against judgement—and this room will be full of practitioners with strong convictions. The agenda is built from what the room judges to be important, and what you offer will be challenged as much as it is developed.

So bring your tools, your code, your designs-in-progress, and your unexplored ideas. Come prepared to collaborate with new people and new technology—and leave richer for the experience.

What to Expect

Learning outcomes in an Open Space are naturally personalised, but as a general rule, the more you invest the greater your return. In addition, every participant will experience:

The New Frontier

Since machine generation crossed the chasm into daily knowledge work, practitioners have navigated a profound tension: caught between anxieties of displacement and loss of agency, and the extraordinary promise of AI-driven human liberation.

We stand at the centre of a real contradiction: the more we integrate artificial agents into our daily work, the more deeply human we are free to become. Navigating this landscape requires what John Keats termed Negative Capability—the rare capacity to dwell in uncertainties and hold opposing truths simultaneously without rushing to rigid, binary answers.

Rather than treating AI purely as a threat or a simple productivity cheat, this gathering explores how intelligent systems can serve as a catalyst for human expressive power, agency, and intuition.

"Agile was right to put people first. But valuing people is not enough. We need to understand the systems they work in, the perceptions and fears that affect action, how people learn, what enables agency, and how practices can be adapted to their actual context." — Alan Shalloway, How AI Can Help...People

Structure & Flow

This is an Open Space Technology event. There are no keynote speakers, passive audiences, or fixed tracks—only the agenda we build together on the day. Guided by self-organising principles, you are invited to bring your questions, experiments, and tools to host sessions or join the conversations that matter most to you.

Periods of reflection will occur throughout the day to share learnings, adjust the agenda, raise (and resolve) concerns, assess value, and find ways to improve on the fly. Participants take responsibility to meet their own needs and to serve the group as a whole.

Who Should Attend?

This gathering is designed for anyone poised at the intersection of human craft and emerging machine intelligence—most prominently those directly involved in the making process: developers, testers, designers, writers, and artists. It is from the makers themselves that new ideas, practices, and innovations will spring.

We also warmly welcome curious leaders, managers, and coaches who support this work, as management endorsement is essential to systemic change.

Finally, because AI raises profound ethical and existential questions, we invite lawyers, philosophers, and researchers to join us. Alongside hands-on tinkering, an ongoing conversation about these broader issues will run throughout the day.

Logistics

This event will be held on Zoom. It runs for six hours.

Start and end times to be determined according to the time zones of those expressing early interest.

Register your interest now to help us set a date and time, and ensure early notice of ticket sales once the date is announced.