Democracy, Rebuilt
OCTOBER 21-23, 2026
In the year since last year’s ATTENTION: Govern or be Governed convened 250 leaders in Montreal, the governance question has shifted under our feet. AI systems are no longer arriving; they are deploying, at scale, into the core functions of democratic life: decision-making in government, information production in journalism, knowledge work in the academy, organizing in civil society.
What follows will be a period of rapid social transformation, and with it the conditions for real upheaval: labour market shocks, epistemic disruption, reorganized public services, new patterns of political organization and contestation.
Sovereignty over democratic institutions is not a given in this moment of rapid change. It is a posture democratic societies must now take, and a project they will have to pursue together.
Attention 2026 takes up this challenge. The conference convenes the people already doing this work from within the institutions themselves. Together we will work through two questions:
what democratic values and norms must be preserved as AI reshapes the functions around them;
what it would actually take to rebuild the institutional capacity to uphold them at the speed of the transition. A fuller concept note is included below.
Through two days of plenary and a full day of facilitated workshops, Attention 2026 is designed to generate shared language, cross-border relationships, and policy instruments that give democratic institutions a meaningful foothold in the governance of AI.
Conference Co-Chairs:
Maria Ressa: UN AI panel co-chair, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, journalist Columbia University
Ben Scott: CEO of Reset Tech
Ethan Zuckerman: Professor and Director of the UMass Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure
Hugo LaRochelle: Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute
Marietje Schaake: Tech-policy expert
João Brant: Secretary for Digital Policies,Secretariat of Social Communication of the Presidency of the Republic of Brazil