AN IDEA FOR DISCUSSION
Monday, April 13, 7 p.m.
NO REGISTRATION NEEDED
To Join Our Conversation,
Just Click this Link at 7 p.m.
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87137888270
An Invitation to Build the
‘Civic Learning Collaborative’
Crafted by Dan Forbush, Bill Walker and Jason Tepper
On Behalf of the Saratoga Torch Club and
Academy for Lifelong Learning
Can a community like Saratoga deliberately build the capacity to think together—using both human judgment and AI—to make wiser, more informed decisions about its future?
Can we transform local knowledge into a kind of civic infrastructure—something as essential as roads or schools—that strengthens democratic life?
In an age of abundant information and fractured attention, can Saratoga become a place where judgment itself is cultivated, shared, and trusted?
Those we’re asking:
Business for Good
Climate Smart Task Force
Friends of the Saratoga Springs Public Library
John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative
Friends of the Saratoga Springs Public Library
Pitney Meadows Community Farm
Saratoga Book Festival
Saratoga County League of Women Voters
Saratoga Civic Pulse
Saratoga County History Center
Saratoga Springs History Museum
Saratoga Civic Pulse
Saratoga Dispatch
Saratoga Senior Center
Saratoga Springs Preservation Foundation
Skidmore College Career Development Center
Skidmore College Encore Program
Our Opportunity
Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming how we produce, circulate, and rely on knowledge. The challenge now is not finding information, but making sense of it.
When communities take their own expertise seriously and make it accessible to others, they build something durable: a shared foundation for understanding. That foundation supports better choices, more informed participation, and a deeper, more resilient form of democratic life.
Putting Smartacus to Work
The Smartacus Story Accelerator is a suite of AI tools designed to convert expert conversations into structured civic knowledge. Our process combines deep searches in ChatGPT, conversations hosted in Zoom and transcribed in Otter, transcripts uploaded and aggregated with up to 300 other sources in NotebookLM, ChatGPT’s reworking of content extracted from NotebookLM, and, finally, a close review and sign off by experts who give us permission to efficiently “mine” and publish their knowledge in the public interest.
We can weave into our transcripts material from additional verified sources we’ve loaded into NotebookLM, including articles and book chapters the expert has written or interviews published. In so doing, we effectively expand the expert’s memory and organize its contents.
Experts often tell us: “You make me sound smarter than I really am.”
“Yep,” we say. “That’s AI.”
Supporting Community Dialog
Hosted with the Saratoga Torch Club in monthly gatherings over dinner and in weekly meetings in Zoom, Civic Conversations brings together local leaders, experts, and engaged citizens for thoughtful, exchanges that value curiosity, lived experience, and collective reasoning.
With our AI tools, we capture and refine these conversations, mining the knowledge of participating experts and transforming it into publishable civic media—articles, audio, and narrative features that extend each dialogue beyond the moment. The result is a growing body of shared understanding that not only reflects the community’s thinking but helps guide it.
Supporting Heritage Tourism
Combining our AI tools with STQRY, a platform that supports GPS-triggered self-guided audio tours on smartphones, we’ve achieved remarkable efficiencies in spatial storytelling. Visitors experience history as they move through the landscape.
Aiming to develop a new generation of spatial storytellers, we’ll soon begin interviewing Skidmore students who would like to join us this summer in producing tours for Voices of Saratoga.
To research these tours, we host conversations with experts on Saratoga history in Zoom and invite members of the Saratoga Torch Club and Academy for Lifelong Learning to join us. With the experts’ review and signoff, we publish magazine-length features on Stories from Open Space.
Watching the Rise of AI
AI at Work offers a shared platform where all who are exploring AI can place hands on the elephant and compare notes on what we’re feeling. In a moment defined as much by uncertainty as by possibility, this work is about making sense of the whole by listening carefully to each partial view.
Along the way, we’re surfacing the most inventive AI applications that Saratogians are developing in the public interest—projects that illuminate what’s possible when curiosity meets purpose. Just as important, we’ll report on the most consequential conversations unfolding about AI: where it’s taking us, how it’s changing the nature of work and knowledge, and what it asks of us as citizens.
Team
Dan Forbush
Named one of the 100 most influential public relations practitioners of the 20th century by PR Week, Dan launched ProfNet as an email-based expert network for reporters in 1992. After serving in senior communications positions at Syracuse University, the University at Stony Brook, and Skidmore College, he embarked in 2015 on exploring the potential of Basecamp as a tool comparable in power to email. The advance of such tools as Zoom, Otter, NotebookLM, ChatGPT, ElevenLabs and STQRY now make collaboration and community-building exponentially easier. We can combine all of them in the next generation of ProfNet we call the Smartacus Story Accelerator.
Bill Walker
A seasoned expert in academic public relations, Walker has had a distinguished career spanning several of the nation’s top institutions — including Skidmore, where he served during the Palamountain era. Walker and Forbush met in 1978 when Walker was Skidmore’s chief communications officer and Forbush was a green-as-grass media relations consultant. Walker moved on to assume a series of communications vice presidencies at the College of William and Mary, Rutgers University, Dartmouth College, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The Council for Advancement and Support of Education presented Walker its Distinguished Service Award in 2018.
Jason Tepper
Jason is a Saratoga Springs–based entrepreneur and advisor whose work focuses on leadership development and organizational strategy. He is the co-founder and managing director of xLEAD, a firm that develops leadership tools and approaches designed to help individuals, teams, and organizations adapt in a rapidly changing world. Jason also serves as a strategic advisor and fractional chief strategy and operating officer to a range of organizations, providing guidance on growth, operations, and long-term strategy. In the nonprofit sector, he has played a significant leadership role with Universal Preservation Hall in Saratoga Springs, where he serves on the board and holds positions including treasurer and finance committee chair. He holds an MBA from INSEAD with a focus on entrepreneurship and organizational behavior and earned a B.S. in engineering from Cornell University.
Dominic Giordano
Graduating from Skidmore College in 2025 with a major in political science, Giordano mastered all of the AI and GPS tools used by Saratoga AI to generate magazine-length feature stories and audio narratives and put them to work in the voicing of the Explore Warren County Audio Tour and Voices of Lake Luzerne. He’s now in the Peace Corps, teaching English to kids in Costa Rica. We’re hoping he rejoins our team when he completes his service or even finds a way to put Smartacus to work for the Peace Corps.
