I’ve spent more than twenty years in frontline community development and social work — alongside Māori, Pasifika and CALD whānau here in Aotearoa, and earlier in East Africa. That work taught me to look first for who isn’t in the room, because their absence is usually what shapes what gets decided.
Now I’m bringing that lens to AI and automated systems - the silent machinery in the background deciding who gets help, who gets flagged, who gets support. The Room is where I think out loud about that: the ethics, the harm, the design, and the people these systems are meant to serve but too often flattened into a ticked box or risk score.
These systems now decide your insurance approval, your loan application, your health benefits or your children’s student loan. The tragedy is that these decisions mostly hit the most vulnerable of us. The unemployed, the disabled, the refugees, the minority communities. These are the people I bring into our room conversations, so that we can all see the harm that is caused.
My practice is grounded in Ubuntu - ‘I am because we are’. People aren’t inputs to a system; they’re the reason the system exists.
If this resonates, pull up a chair. Get comfy. Let’s talk.
Denise
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