The next lab will take place on Tuesday, October 20th and Wednesday, October 21st from 3pm to 6pm UTC (check your time zone). Registration details are below.
This is the first time I’m running this edition of the lab. It is a prototype: a space to test ideas, learn together, and explore what facilitative leadership for collective power can look like in the age of AI. I’m looking for participants willing to experiment with me, bring real questions from their work, share their experience, and help shape the workshop’s development. You do not need to arrive with answers — only a willingness to explore the opportunities and challenges AI creates for collective power.
The Facilitating Collective Power in the Age of AI lab is for facilitators, organisers, and activists who advance equity and participation in a world increasingly shaped by AI. The lab equips participants to foster participatory, inclusive spaces while centring the development and practice of facilitative leadership, enabling individuals and groups to strategise, collaborate, and drive collective action.
This two-day, online lab starts from a simple premise: AI is not just a tool to adopt or reject; it is both a threat environment to navigate and a strategic opportunity to use in support of collective power. Participants will explore how AI can support strategy, collaboration, learning, and accessibility, while also building the analysis needed to respond to the ways AI is concentrating power across civil society, public life, and social movements.
The Facilitating Collective Power in the Age of AI lab offers a hands-on approach to developing leadership practices that help communities and organisations act more effectively under pressure. Key aspects include:
- Developing facilitation techniques and frameworks that help groups use AI in ways that support participation, reflection, and shared ownership.
- Practising “facilitative leadership,” which focuses on supporting and guiding teams, rather than directing them, so people strengthen their capacity to think, decide, and act together.
- Learning to design and facilitate strategy sessions based on power analysis, including analysis of how AI is concentrating economic, political, and institutional power.
- Exploring how organisers, civil society groups, and communities can build collective power to shape AI in more democratic, accountable, and public-interest directions.
What Participants Will Gain
Participants in the lab will gain practical skills to:
- Use AI more thoughtfully to support facilitation, strategy, sense-making, and collaborative work.
- Strengthen leadership qualities that support inclusive movements and create just alternatives in a fast-changing technological environment.
- Lead community-centred strategy processes and facilitate conversations about AI in ways that build trust, engagement, and solidarity.
- Help groups think strategically about where AI creates useful openings for collective action, and where it creates new risks, dependencies, and power imbalances.
- Join a diverse network of facilitative leaders contributing to The Collective Power Playbook, extending leadership skills and learnings beyond the lab.
About the Workshop
This two-day, online lab prioritises leadership skill development and is facilitated by Dirk Slater, who brings nearly three decades of experience in social justice movement building in more than forty countries.
The lab is especially valuable for people supporting charities, advocacy organisations, grassroots movements, and community networks who want to engage AI without losing sight of participation, justice, and democratic agency.
Our communities of change need people in it who know how to harness our collective power — and this workshop is such a great step in beginning that journey.
— Facilitating Collective Power Lab Participant
The Facilitating Collective Power in the Age of AI lab provides a practical opportunity to strengthen leadership, deepen analysis, and develop collective strategies for working with and responding to AI in ways that support more just, resilient, and participatory futures.
FabRiders uses a “pay what you can” pricing structure to ensure that financial barriers do not prevent anyone from participating. Participants are invited to select the tier that best reflects their means. Each contribution directly supports the operating costs of running these labs, our work developing The Collective Power Playbook, and ensures that no one is turned away for lack of funds.
