Longview Philanthropy
Overview
This collaboration explores how our infrastructure and facilitation can contribute to a broader field of inquiry around AI governance, local capacity, and resilient information systems.
Working with Longview Philanthropy provides an opportunity to demonstrate reproducible methods for convening local communities around complex technological challenges while strengthening the organisational capabilities needed to support future work. Alongside external delivery, the collaboration also serves as an opportunity for prisma to refine operational practices, documentation, and deployment infrastructure for use in future engagements.
The work is structured around two complementary objectives:
- strengthening internal organisational capacity through practical delivery; and
- producing openly documented methods that other organisations can adapt and build upon.
Internal Capacity Development
Building sustainable contributor pathways
Healthy ecosystems depend on healthy incentive structures.
As an emerging organisation, we rely on contributors who are motivated by the mission while also recognising that meaningful participation requires time, resources, and practical opportunities to collaborate. Project-based engagements create funded opportunities for contributors to participate in concrete milestones, receive compensation where possible, and build long-term working relationships.
Shared projects are also one of the most effective ways to grow the network. Collaboration creates trust, develops shared practices, and enables future partnerships.
Strategic organisational development
Projects with mission-aligned partners provide an opportunity to strengthen organisational sustainability while remaining aligned with long-term goals.
Rather than depending exclusively on conventional funding models, delivery work can help us
- expand our portfolio of completed work;
- improve our technical infrastructure;
- develop organisational processes;
- build relationships with aligned organisations; and
- create financial capacity to support future research and development.
Maintaining clear internal checkpoints helps ensure that delivery work continues to support the broader mission rather than defining it.
Operational learning
Each collaboration also functions as an operational learning environment.
By documenting facilitation practices, deployment processes, and technical workflows, we aim to increase our ability to organise and deliver future programmes independently across different locations and contexts.
Field Building
Action research
Rather than treating workshops or events as isolated interventions, our work approaches them as action-research environments within a larger, self-evolving action-learning network.
The methodology builds on previous experience designing collaborative technical programmes, adapting established formats to explore questions surrounding AI, digital infrastructure, and local knowledge production.
Both physical and digital environments are designed to encourage interaction between practitioners, researchers, technologists, and local communities.
From problems to potential
Many conversations around AI governance focus primarily on identifying risks.
This collaboration instead asks what becomes possible when communities have immediate access to independent technical infrastructure that enables them to document, analyse, and understand their own contexts.
The emphasis is on creating practical capability while generating new observations about how local actors organise around shared challenges.
Open and reproducible outputs
A central outcome of the project is the production of openly accessible documentation.
Where appropriate, we aim to publish:
- facilitation guides;
- technical deployment templates;
- implementation documentation;
- lessons learned; and
- case studies describing both successes and limitations.
The intention is to make the work reproducible so that other organisations can adapt the approach to their own contexts without relying on proprietary infrastructure or specialised expertise.
About Longview Philanthropy
Longview Philanthropy is a philanthropic advisory organisation associated with the Effective Altruism and longtermist communities.
Their approach to evaluating opportunities is commonly framed around three questions:
- Scale - could an intervention contribute to addressing significant systemic challenges?
- Tractability - is there a credible path from investment to measurable capability or impact?
- Neglectedness - does the work address areas that receive comparatively little attention or support?
Within AI governance, these priorities often include reducing systemic risks associated with increasingly concentrated technological power while supporting interventions that expand institutional and technical capacity in underrepresented regions.
Longview works with philanthropic donors seeking opportunities where relatively focused investments can produce durable structural benefits. This emphasis on leverage, measurable capability creation, and underexplored contexts aligns well with experimental, place-based approaches that combine technical infrastructure with community participation.
Why this collaboration
This collaboration brings together shared interests in systems thinking, technical capacity building, and open knowledge production.
By combining practical programme delivery with transparent documentation, the project seeks to strengthen local capabilities while contributing reusable methods that others can learn from, critique, and extend. The resulting case studies and technical resources are intended to support a growing community of practitioners working at the intersection of information systems, facilitation, and regenerative approaches to technology.