Last week ended with a question: whose voices was I missing? This week I completed my direct conversations by speaking with an official at Indias AI Centre of Excellence and a philanthropic funder, bringing the total to four. My original outline aimed for eight to ten conversations with NGO leaders and community advocates. I did not reach that number, and the people I spoke with were closer to institutions and technology than to the communities facing the greatest exposure to air pollution. I want to be honest about that gap, because it shaped what I did next.

The conversations gave me two further perspectives. The AI Centre of Excellence official helped me see how national conversations about AI and sustainable cities are framed, and the funder helped me understand how resources move toward solutions and what evidence they look for. With those, I had heard from people who build technology, people who have worked inside government, people who shape national AI policy, and people who finance change.

To address the missing voices, I turned to stakeholder mapping. I organized the field into three circles: the groups directly affected by poor air quality, the groups whose activities emit pollutants, and the institutions that can set standards, enforce them, generate evidence, or fund change. By the end of the week, I had mapped 33 groups across the three circles. For each, I identified a representative organization or institution and wrote a short rationale for why it belongs in the conversation. I researched community organizations and advocacy groups, including those representing informal workers, waste pickers, slum dwellers, and women who cook with solid fuels, to understand how they describe the problem and what they ask for.

The tangible outcome of this week was the stakeholder map, which would also serve a workshop eGov was planning to bring communities, policymakers, and technologists into the same room. The map made the problem visible in a way that prose had not. The groups most affected by air pollution are largely civil society organizations, while the groups with the power to act are largely institutions, and they rarely sit at the same table.

The Laidlaw attribute most visible this week was collaborative leadership. Mapping stakeholders is a way of deciding who counts, and I felt the responsibility of that choice. Empathy, in the form of trying to see the problem through the eyes of those I had not spoken with, and rigor, in documenting my reasoning for each group, guided the work.

My role this week was moving from researcher to contributor, as the map became something the team could use.

Next week, I will bring the conversations, the map, and my reading together in a draft of the brief.