Sensing and community at scale

What this is about

In May 2023, ten people turned up to a lunchtime meeting about AI. Three years on, 957 practitioners across three countries were engaging with that same community every month — 72% of them actively, not passively. The weekly newsletter that grew alongside it now reaches an international subscriber base and has been adopted by New Zealand's national AI in HE community of practice as a sector resource. The intelligence it produces has briefed a university's governing body; the community's feedback shaped RMIT's institutional AI plan.

This is what functioning capability infrastructure looks like when it's working. Not a high-stakes room, not a single occasion — the system that runs underneath everything else and makes it possible.

The problem it solves

AI capability is moving faster than any individual institution can track. New models, new research, new risks, and new tools arrive at a pace that makes this month's innovation potentially obsolete by next. For 957 practitioners across multiple disciplines, the challenge is not just keeping up — it's translating what matters at the frontier into something immediately useful for a lecturer designing an assessment, a learning designer building a course, or a programme manager making a tool recommendation. And then ensuring the same intelligence reaches the people making strategic decisions before those decisions are made without it.

How it works

Scanning and translation. The weekly scanning, synthesis, and circulation of what's actually happening at the AI frontier. The newsletter is the most visible output. The monthly sessions open with live polling to surface real practitioner data before anything is presented, and close with frameworks people can use immediately. The same intelligence base produced the pre-reading brief for a university council strategy day — the work operates at different frequencies, from weekly practitioner updates to executive briefings.

Community, deliberately built. This is the part that's hardest to replicate. 957 members did not accumulate because the content was good. They accumulated because the space was designed for genuine participation: psychological safety, room for experimentation, tolerance for failure, and the explicit message that not knowing is fine. Engagement runs at 72% monthly not because attendance is tracked but because people find it useful and feel safe contributing. A steering group drawn from every school and campus ensures the community serves practitioners rather than performing for leadership. That kind of trust cannot be mandated top-down. It has to be built from inside, over time, by someone with credibility on both sides of the boundary.

What it produces

Distributed capability. 957 practitioners who are genuinely current, not passively subscribed. Colleagues who began as participants now run independent workshop series, publish research, and share intelligence through their own networks — multiplying impact beyond what any central function could generate alone.

Intelligence that reaches decisions. The same infrastructure that produces the newsletter produced the pre-reading brief for the university's governing body, and community feedback was described at deputy vice-chancellor level as essential to the institution's AI plan. The community is not a recipient of institutional communication — it is a source of the intelligence that informs it.

Sector reach. Adoption by New Zealand's national AI in HE community of practice, and an international subscriber base, means the work extends well beyond one institution's boundaries — infrastructure with sector-level impact, built from inside a single university.

Recognition

The Ralph McIntosh Award — RMIT's highest professional recognition, conferred by the Chancellor — cited this work specifically as sector-leading in AI education, community building, and practical guidance frameworks.

Ten people in 2023. Nine hundred and fifty-seven across three countries today. The infrastructure compounds.

What this demonstrates

Most organisations have announcements. They have policies. They have occasional professional development events. What they lack is the infrastructure to sense what is happening at the frontier, synthesise it into something practitioners can use, circulate it before it's stale, and ensure it reaches decision-makers in time to inform decisions.

Building and sustaining that — at this scale, with this engagement, producing weekly intelligence adopted as a sector resource — is an organisational capability that cannot be improvised. It requires deliberate design, sustained commitment, and the kind of practitioner credibility that comes from being genuinely embedded in the work rather than observing it from above.