Making AI legible: How Canada is building the nutrition label for AI that cities use - and why your city should be in the room

Cities everywhere are deploying AI — optimizing traffic, allocating services, making consequential decisions — while most residents have no idea it’s happening, let alone how to question it.

Canada is doing something about it. This hands-on workshop, co-led by Helpful Places and The Dais (Toronto Metropolitan University), brings an active open standards development process into the FWD50 room — one that convenes municipalities, policy experts, and residents to define what meaningful AI transparency actually looks like in practice.

The work is rooted in Canada but designed to travel: the open framework emerging from this process is purpose-built so any municipality in the world can implement it.

Participants will engage directly with live standards-making, work through what information their city actually owes the public about AI. They will leave with a practical framework for communicating AI use and a voice in shaping tools being built right now for cities around the world.