Belfast Inclusive Futures
On February 24, Agirre Lehendakaria Center participated in "Belfast Inclusive Futures" meeting, organized by Belfast City Council. This series of events aims to explore how to ensure inclusive growth in the city in the face of the challenges and opportunities posed by emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence.
The meeting brought together stakeholders from government, industry, academia, and local and international communities to discuss open innovation and its relationship with territorial competitiveness, collaborative governance, and the cultural dimension of complex social problems. The focus was on how to articulate innovation ecosystems capable of generating real impact beyond traditional frameworks of public policy and economic development.
One of the central themes of the conversation was community infrastructure. Belfast has hundreds of organizations, many of them created in the 1990s, which continue to operate with organizational models and methodologies that are poorly adapted to today's challenges. The debate addressed how digital innovation can strengthen these organizations' connection with their communities, facilitate closer collaboration with governments, universities, and industry, and develop tools capable of incorporating the cultural and relational dimensions of challenges such as housing, homelessness, employment, and mobility.
In this context, ALC Director Gorka Espiau shared the main lessons learned from the Basque experience and presented K-Tool 2.0, a free software digital infrastructure designed to build bridges between artificial intelligence, the community sector, and civil society. In contrast to fragmented approaches, K-Tool addresses complex social challenges as living, interconnected systems, combining dynamic ecosystem mapping, data-driven digital listening, and collective sensemaking processes validated by people. This approach allows for progress toward ethical collaborative governance models capable of preventing exclusion and activating the latent value of local communities in the definition and evaluation of public strategies.
During their stay in Northern Ireland, the ALC team held meetings with the Belfast government, representatives of the Northern Ireland Executive, and the team from the John Hume and Thomas P. O'Neill Chair in Peace at Ulster University to explore opportunities for collaboration. Among other topics, these meetings explored applications of K-Tool for conflict management and citizen participation.