FID-020 · Open question
Community Co-Design and Faith-AI Governance
How should faith communities participate in defining, testing, and governing AI systems that affect worship, education, pastoral care, administration, and moral formation?
Part of the faith evaluation and FMG-Bench program
Connect theological accuracy, useful application, and care-sensitive conversation through expert validation and a maintained research instrument. These are proposed methods with bounded claims.
Why the question remains open
Generic AI ethics frameworks often treat communities as deployment sites rather than co-design partners. Faith communities have internal authority structures, theological commitments, pastoral practices, and accountability norms that should shape evaluation.
Working hypothesis
A proposition to test, not a finding.
Co-designed evaluations will identify risks and success criteria that generic AI-safety rubrics miss, especially around authority, ritual, formation, community trust, and spiritual dependency.
Proposed method
How the question could be tested
- 01Run structured workshops with faith institutions and community members.
- 02Convert community concerns into evaluation dimensions and scenario cards.
- 03Compare co-designed rubrics against generic helpfulness/safety/factuality rubrics.
- 04Document governance patterns for responsible deployment.
- 05Ask contributors which product or institutional decision evidence would inform; turn these into newly authored, licensed scenario families and test whether generic criteria miss relevant distinctions.
- 06Invite structured feedback on report usefulness, correction requests, and coverage gaps over successive releases; record actual use separately from expressed interest.
Needed controls
What must constrain the study
- 01Avoid treating one institution as representative of a whole tradition.
- 02Protect private community concerns.
- 03Manage institutional conflicts of interest.
- 04Separate research participation from product endorsement.
- 05Product or institution participation requires explicit research/data permissions; customer access and interest do not establish research access or endorsement.
- 06Contributors may challenge cases and interpretation, while independent review and publication of unfavorable results remain protected.
Expected outputs
Artifacts the work should produce
- 01Co-design workshop protocol.
- 02Community-derived risk taxonomy.
- 03Governance guide for faith institutions.
- 04Comparative report on generic vs community-derived evaluation criteria.
Open questions
Uncertainties the protocol must resolve
- 01Who legitimately represents a community for evaluation design?
- 02How should dissenting voices inside institutions be included?
- 03What parts of community input should remain private?
Related calls
Continue through this research area
FID-069
Verifiable Delegation and Revocation in Multi-Agent Networks
How can people and institutions verify which human, organization, agent, or sub-agent is acting; what authority it received; what limits apply; and whether that authority has been narrowed or revoked across a multi-principal agent network?
FID-071
Confidential Agent Memory and Cross-Context Disclosure
How do persistent memory, summaries, retrieval stores, tool traces, delegation, and exports cause confidential context to influence or leak into unrelated sessions, roles, tasks, or organizations? Which technical controls make purpose limitation, deletion, and revocation testable?
FID-077
Independent Agent Incident Investigation and Evidence Sufficiency
What operational evidence lets independent investigators reconstruct an agent incident, distinguish competing explanations, and identify which interventions could have changed the outcome?
Open question
Open work
Primary need: participatory design, institutional partners
- Host a workshop.
- Facilitate participatory design.
- Translate concerns into measurable evaluation criteria.