Author information

Are you asking your clients about their digital access, literacy, and comfort as part of your intake or assessment processes? You should be. Here are some questions you can and should add to your intake and assessment flow to help you understand your clients and make better technology decisions.

Last year I wrote a post You don't need to be an early AI adopter, but pay attention where I shared some reports and links, mainly focused on ethical and responsible use of AI. I wrote "Ignoring whether or not you care about being a frontrunner in AI adoption, I think a key point is that you don’t need to be. But you need to be paying attention. And maybe seeking out some early adopters to learn from and even partner with." It's still true.

Switchboard, a one-stop resource hub for refugee service providers in the United States, and the University of Utah recently ran Confluence, a conference to provide participants with valuable insights into co-creation design methodology, innovative approaches to virtual case management using Artificial Intelligence, and ideas for developing cross-industry partnerships to create sustainable, innovative solutions that improve outcomes for newcomers.

This webinar, hosted by Peel Newcomer Strategy Group with support of Digital Transformation committee of the Executive Council of Peel-Halton Settlement Partnerships, is designed to share knowledge and discuss the potential impact of Artificial Intelligence. This is the first session in a 4-part webinar series exploring the transformative potential of AI in newcomer-serving sector, with a special focus on how AI can enhance our services and operations.

The use of AI notetakers and AI scribes in the context of community, human, and health services has come up as an area of excitement and concern. Many people are starting to use them and there are concerns about privacy, control over meeting notes and artefacts. Many have been using them without having any policies in place. There is a desire to have some useful and practical guidelines and policies in place. In this article I'm providing some useful articles and sources that I have found to provide an overview of the issues that service providers should be aware of.

The treatment of asylum seekers is an important issue for many countries as they grapple with polarized public views on the issue. Researchers analyzed discourse about asylum seekers on Twitter — now X — at the time of the closing of Roxham Road.

In this Technology in Human Services podcast episode I was joined by Ibukun Abejirinde and Nancy Clark to talk about their work looking at how to re-imagine digital or virtual health care through a compassionate lens, focusing on Newcomers to Canada.

This May 2024 Scottish AI Alliance workshop focused on Bias in Generative AI, specifically on text-generating technologies called Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT. University of Edinburgh PhD student Lara Dal Molin moderated the session exploring concrete instances of bias in an open-source LLM.

In this December 2023 Catalyst webinar, Digital Evaluations expert Tom Keyte outlined findings and guidance resulting from new research conducted on the evaluation of digital products and services for non-profit organizations, evaluators, funders and digital agencies. Keyte highlighted the ins and outs of evaluating digital products, providing simple steps you can implement to improve your digital product development and evaluation.