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Websmith Studio is proud to sponsor the Build-A-Thon at the 7th World Conference, held August 3–5, 2026 at the University of Minnesota. In collaboration with the AI4Afrika coalition, the gathering gives us an opportunity to bring one of our ongoing Studio projects, Community-Centered Language Models, into a real-world community setting.
The project explores how AI and language models might help people preserve and protect what they know, make connections across collective memory, and create new ways to access knowledge that might otherwise be fragmented, overlooked, or lost. Rather than building a system intended to know a little about everything, we are interested in what becomes possible when a model is created for a specific context, shaped by the people closest to that context, and designed around a clear purpose.
At the 7th World Conference, we will explore how the stories and knowledge shared by the community can be preserved with their context intact, connected across people and generations, and made easier to discover and learn from. Community-centered language models are one way we’re experimenting with creating new access to that collective knowledge while keeping the people closest to it at the center of how it is represented, interpreted, and used.
Check back for updates on what we learn and build from the stories shared by the 7WC community.
