Join a Civic Conversation in the Smartacus Story Accelerator#
Proposed Date and Time in Zoom: Monday, May 11, 7 to 8:30 p.m.
Introduction
The Saratoga Civic Learning Collaborative is a partnership led by the Saratoga Torch Club and the Academy for Lifelong Learning to strengthen how our community learns, reasons, and acts together.
It is built on a simple premise: at a moment when information is abundant but judgment is scarce, communities need better ways to transform local knowledge into shared understanding. By bringing together educators, students, professionals, and engaged citizens, the Collaborative creates a space where expertise is surfaced, tested, and applied in the public interest.
Artificial Intelligence can make a key contribution. We hope Skidmore's Career Development Center will join our collaboration by helping Saratoga AI develop a team of Civic Media Fellows to generate communications that serve the public interest and aid our effort to establish Saratoga AI as a successful public benefit corporation creating opportunities for Skidmore students long into the future. The standard rate we pay students is $20 per hour.
Data from the NACE Winter 2026 Salary Survey confirms that technical fluency remains a top priority for recruiters. Computer Science currently ranks as the third most in-demand degree, with 60% hiring interest and an average starting salary of $81,535.
While technical majors like Computer Engineering command high media nearnings—often reach $90,000 five years post-graduation according to the Federal Reserve—the real opportunity lies in equipping non-technical students with AI skills that augment their specific disciplinary expertise.
For Skidmore students, this creates a "first-mover" advantage—if they can master these tools today.
The Smartacus Story Acceleratorisan advanced toolset designed to convert expert knowledge "mined" through in-depth conversations in Zoom into structured civic knowledge.
No content is published without the explicit review and sign-off of the participating experts
Our rigorous "human-in-the-loop" framework upholds the three pillars of ethical AI: Fairness, Transparency, and Trust.
Our AI at Workshared platform serves as a forum for Saratogians to "place hands on the elephant"—a collaborative space where we can compare notes on the technology's impact and mitigate risks together. This ensures that Saratoga remains a community where technology serves human judgment, rather than replacing it.
We engage both ChatGPT and NotebookLM in our research.
We propose to align with Skidmore in developing a community-wide capacity for collective reasoning. Your participation will help us to "co-architect" a bridge that moves Skidmore students from the classroom to careers defined by purpose and technological mastery.