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Emma Irwin

How Can Open Communities Shape Representation in a Model?

How Can Open Communities Shape Representation in a Model?

💡A new section I will add to my newsletters - good things happening! Duane O'Brien named Executive Director of the OSI. I am very encouraged by this news - Duane is an experienced expert, but also one of the most sincere, authentic people I have had the pleasure to collaborate

Attribution vs. Preference Signaling: A Question for the Commons

Attribution vs. Preference Signaling: A Question for the Commons

Our AI Alignment in Open Source Working Group came across Stefano Maffulli's paper on Preference Signaling and wanted to learn more about whether this term, which cuts across a growing group of initiatives, might give people reason to feel more optimistic about the future of the commons. I

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Thank you to my subscribers and readers. I genuinely appreciate your trust and support. Also thank you to those, who made their way to my GitHub Sponsors - it means a lot to feel my work mattered to you. I am increasingly conscious that writing and building for the commons is

Aha Moment - The difference between attribution and preference Signalling

Aha Moment - The difference between attribution and preference Signalling

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Digital Sovereignty in Canada: Why Education Is the Place to Start

This post is based on a presentation I gave at our Open Source Practitioner Call in March 2026 and related collaborations with educators and students. Like conversations around AI, I find that everyone uses this term (digital sovereignty) to mean different things (and in many cases this is due to

After Open Source - An Optimistic Prediction

After Open Source - An Optimistic Prediction

In this moment, AI is being built for developers, by developers, and marketed back to developers. This hyper-focus on developer productivity, cheap tokens, and the corporate race to win these audiences has had an unsurprising side effect: human spaces and communities have been flooded with uninvited noise, cognitive drain,

Right-Clicking on Open Source AI: 9 things I learned trying to 'view source'

Right-Clicking on Open Source AI: 9 things I learned trying to 'view source'

I learn by doing, and this was one of those times In recent CHAOSS AI Alignment Working Group and in Open Future meetups, we've been talking about openness, and what it means for AI to be aligned with human intentions, specifically as it relates to honoring the work

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