The other half of the watch. That page records what already happened; this one lists what has a date on it, so there is still time to do something about it. Soonest first. Every line carries a date, a place and a source.
Most of what follows is a meeting somebody else is holding. You can watch it, read what comes out of it, and hold it to what it said. That is worth knowing, but it is not participation.
A few entries are marked Open door. Those are consultations, calls for evidence and comment periods: a published process where an ordinary person or a small organisation can put something in writing and have it counted. Those are the ones that matter most here, because Q9 asks who the many are and how they are actually asked, and a door nobody walked through is part of that answer.
Dates are given as the source states them. Where a source says a month but not a day, the entry says so rather than inventing precision. Defence and military events are left out under the same standing rule as the watch.
The months ahead
The calendar draws itself from the entries below. With JavaScript switched off it does not appear, and every date, place and source is still on this page in the list.
Coming up
63rd session of the UN Human Rights Council Q9
Palais des Nations, Geneva, Switzerland, and on UN Web TV
The Council sits for five weeks and rises on 9 October. Two things on its programme have been held and one is still running. On 11 September, from 4pm to 5.30pm central European summer time, it held an interactive dialogue with the Expert Mechanism on the Right to Development on what artificial intelligence systems do to cultural rights and to the right to development; the report it discussed, numbered A/HRC/63/40, names Indigenous Peoples, minorities and developing countries as the people it is about, and it stays on the record whether or not the sitting was watched. On 23 September the annual half-day panel on the rights of Indigenous Peoples sat from 10am to noon, on the World Heritage Convention and Indigenous Peoples' rights and engagement, which is the question of who controls cultural heritage and access to land once a designation is made; interactive dialogues ran the same day with the Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples and with the Expert Mechanism, one of them on Indigenous Peoples in conflict. No account of either sitting has been published here yet, and both are kept on UN Web TV. What is still live is a resolution titled Implications of artificial intelligence for the promotion and protection of human rights, put up by Bangladesh, Egypt and Nepal, negotiated across the session and voted before it rises. This carries no door chip, and the reason belongs in the entry rather than in a footnote. Oral statements at the Council are made by non-governmental organisations in consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council, so the way in runs through an accredited organisation rather than through a form anyone may fill in. Watching is open to anybody.
Bay City sends its draft data centre rules to a subcommittee and will take them up again in October Q10
Bay City, Bay County, Michigan, United States
More than a dozen residents spoke when the planning commission reviewed the draft ordinance, and the commission then formed a subcommittee to study it further and revisit it in October. The city's planning and zoning manager describes the draft as guardrails, covering facility size, power demand, water use, noise and what happens when a facility is decommissioned. Decommissioning is worth noting because few of the drafts on this page name it: it asks what the building becomes when the machines are no longer wanted. The city commission had earlier asked planning staff and the zoning consultant, nine votes to none, to study data centre zoning, environmental limits and public engagement. The month is published and the day is not, which is why this entry carries no marked day on the calendar above; the planning commission agenda is where the date will appear.
New Brunswick asks about its data centre rules while one project is already in the works Open doorQ9Q10
New Brunswick, Canada, through an online form on the provincial government's site
The New Brunswick Growth Office opened public comment on 1 September on a proposed policy framework to guide future data centre projects, and takes input through an online form until 2 October. The framework sets out what the province wants from a data centre: that it protect electricity ratepayers, make responsible use of energy, water and land, produce measurable economic and community benefits, and advance Canadian data sovereignty. New data centres would pay for any increase in utility costs they cause, and would be required to engage meaningfully with local governments and Indigenous communities through development. What the CBC put in its headline is the part to hold beside it: the province is seeking comment while one project is already in the works, so the rules being asked about arrive after the first proposal rather than before it. It opened two days before the federal government announced its Responsible Data Centre Development Principles on 3 September, and it asks much the same question Ontario asked until 12 September, which is recorded in what already came. The province's own consultation page refused automated reading for this scan, so the dates here come from two news reports that agree; the form itself is on that page.
Beaufort County put its vote back a month so more people could get a word in Open doorQ10
Beaufort County Board of Commissioners, 136 West Second Street, Washington, North Carolina, United States
The commissioners were to consider a one-year pause on data centre development at their September meeting. They have put the decision back to 5 October, and the reason officials gave for doing it is the part worth keeping: to give residents more time to weigh in. An informal hearing was still held in September to take comments, with no vote attached to it, and the final public hearing, the board discussion and the vote all sit together on 5 October from half past five. This is the opposite of the more common shape on this page, where a date gets pulled forward or a window runs nine days. It is also a county where the thing being paused has already moved: an AI data centre proposal in Beaufort County was withdrawn while the commissioners were weighing the moratorium, which leaves the board writing a rule with nothing in front of it to decide, the same position St Louis County was in when it wrote its rules, now recorded in what already came.
Lexington sets aside a whole council sitting to hear its residents on data centres Open doorQ10
Council Chambers, Government Center, 200 East Main Street, Lexington, Kentucky, United States
The Urban County Council voted in June for a pause on data centre permits, development plans and zone changes across Fayette County, running to 31 October, and started the formal process of amending the zoning ordinance. A planning commission hearing on the draft language was held on 30 July and drew hours of comment, and the council took the commission's updated recommendations at a work session on 25 August, which has now passed. The General Government and Planning Committee took an informational presentation from planning staff on 8 September, which has now passed. One date remains, published on the city's own engagement page. On 6 October at 5:30pm a special Committee of the Whole sits, and the city gives the reason for that one in plain terms: to gather public input, at a more accessible hour than the council's usual afternoon meetings. The October date matters because of what sits three weeks behind it. The pause runs out on 31 October, so that sitting is close to the last chance to say anything before the council has to either adopt rules or let the permits resume. Written comment can also go to the planning commission and to councillors by email, and both addresses are published on the city's page.
Raleigh gives the whole public thirty minutes on a six-month pause Open doorQ10
Raleigh Municipal Building, second floor, 222 West Hargett Street, Raleigh, North Carolina, United States
On 15 September the city council told the city attorney to draft an ordinance putting a six-month stop on development approvals for major data centres, meaning any new one above 10,000 square feet, and set the public hearing for the evening session on 6 October. Existing facilities are untouched, and the Raleigh area already has twenty of them. What the six months are for is the usual question asked late: whether the development rules the city already has can carry buildings of this size and draw. Residents sign up to speak through the council's public hearings page. One number published beside the hearing belongs in the entry rather than under it. The mayor and council have set aside thirty minutes in total for the public hearing, for a city of nearly half a million people. That is the same rationing seen at Colorado Springs further down this page, where 148 people signed up and 120 were allowed to speak; here the cap is on the clock rather than on the count, and how many get to speak depends on how many turn up. Raleigh is the last of the large Wake County councils to reach this point: Cary has taken eighteen months and Durham County nine.
Oakland needs seven votes rather than five to stop data centres for forty-five days Q10
Oakland City Council, Alameda County, California, United States
The council's Life Enrichment Committee voted unanimously on 22 September for a 45-day stop on new data centres, and the full council votes on it on 6 October. It was put up by the committee's chair, District 3 councillor Carroll Fife, and it reaches both the development and the operation of data centres in the city, which is wider than most of the pauses on this page: they stop approvals, and this one names operation as well. Fife gave the reason plainly, that the spread of artificial intelligence has brought data centres more resource-intensive than those before them, drawing significant amounts of electrical power and water. The arithmetic is the part to hold. Because it is an urgency measure the ordinance needs a supermajority of seven votes on a council where five would ordinarily carry, so a measure that passed its committee without a dissenting voice can still fail on the floor by falling two short. That is the same shape as Denton further down this page, where a pause carried four to three through the preliminary votes and needs a supermajority at adoption. What residents said at the committee is on the record, and it was not about zoning. Dozens spoke in the public comment, most urging the council to treat the pause as a first step towards stricter rules or a permanent ban. Medina Muñoz, who lives in the Sobrante Park neighbourhood of East Oakland, told the committee that she and her daughters live with asthma, that they are tired of living with pollution, and asked that the city study what contaminants would be released before it approves anything. This carries no door chip, on the same reading this page applies elsewhere: residents demonstrably spoke at the committee stage, and the reporting does not say what comment arrangements apply at the council sitting on 6 October, so the council's own agenda is the thing to check. Oakland is the fourth Californian entry on this page holding a 45-day pause, alongside Mendocino County, Escondido and Palm Springs, and reporting describes Bay Area cities more widely closing the door on new ones.
Mendocino County has forty-five days to decide whether to take two years Open doorQ10
Mendocino County, California, United States
The board of supervisors adopted an urgency ordinance on 2 September, five votes to nil, putting a 45-day stop on new data centre uses in the unincorporated parts of the county. It took effect immediately and runs to 16 October, and the board has set a public hearing for 6 October at which it may extend that stop for up to two years while permanent rules are written, which is ten days before the pause would otherwise lapse. The reason given is as plain as these get: deputy county counsel Matthew Kiedrowski told the board the county code does not define a data centre or regulate one at all. Section 65858 of the California Government Code is what allows this. It lets a local government freeze a use for 45 days on a four-fifths vote, and then extend. One thing belongs beside the date, because it is the same instrument tested in court this year. A judge directed Imperial County to set its own data centre moratorium aside, finding the county had not shown that data centres posed a threat to public health or safety, which is the finding an urgency ordinance rests on. Mendocino is the third Californian county or city on this page holding a 45-day pause, alongside Escondido and Imperial, and the October hearing is where it says what it found in the time it bought.
Monticello hears three applications for a three million square foot campus, and the clock on the decision is already extended Open doorQ10
Mississippi Room, Monticello Community Center, 505 Walnut Street, Monticello, Wright County, Minnesota, United States
Monticello Tech LLC has applied to build a technology campus of about three million square feet on roughly 550 acres south of 85th Street and east of Highway 25. The planning commission takes the public on it on 6 October at 6pm, on three applications at once: a rezoning of the land, a conditional use permit under the city's own Data Center Planned Unit Development ordinance, and a preliminary plat. Two ways in are published. Speaking in the room when the commission opens the floor, and written comment by email to the community development address, which has to be in by 4pm on the day to go into the project record. Three million square feet is about seventy acres of floor, or roughly forty football fields laid end to end under one set of roofs. Two things are worth holding beside the date. This is a city that already wrote a data centre ordinance and is now applying it, which is the other half of nearly every entry on this page: most places here are writing the rule, and this one is using it. And the city has extended its own decision deadline by 60 days, giving it 120 days in total and a final determination due by 8 December, so the body being asked has taken more time and the people being asked have until 4pm on one afternoon. The application file includes a water study and a sanitary study; the figures in them are not on the city's summary page, which is where anyone writing in would want to start.
Australia's committee on artificial intelligence hears OpenAI in Sydney, then reports in November Q9
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, and Parliament House, Canberra
The Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, appointed by both houses on 20 August, closed its submissions on 14 September after a window of about three and a half weeks, and that door is recorded in what already came. Its remit runs from national security, productivity and living standards to data sovereignty, sovereign AI capability, worker displacement, scams, intellectual property, take-up by small and family businesses, and the effect on communities. A hearing date has now surfaced, which is the part this entry could not give before. OpenAI's chief strategy officer, Jason Kwon, is travelling from the United States to appear before this committee in Sydney on 6 October, and the company has lodged a submission to it. That is five days after the Senate hearing in Canberra further up this page, which the same company declined on the ground that the notice was too short to arrange executive travel. The report is due no later than 30 November. What is still unchecked is whether the committee publishes the submissions, including those from people who wrote in on their own account, and whether any further hearing days are listed; the committee's own page refused automated reading for this scan, and that page is where both would appear.
Northern Ireland asks about its draft AI strategy Open doorQ9
Northern Ireland, United Kingdom, online
The Executive Office opened an eight-week consultation on 12 August on Northern Ireland's draft artificial intelligence strategy, which sets out how AI is to be taken up across the public sector. The draft is built on eight principles: human oversight, accountability and redress, data governance, technical safety and security, fairness and transparency, sustainability, societal benefit, and training and literacy. It states that AI should add to what people can do rather than replace them, and that human decision-making is to be kept. The First Minister said the office wants to hear directly from people, communities and organisations, so the strategy is shaped by those it affects most, which puts individuals inside the invitation. Responses go through the Executive Office's consultations page.
Smithfield banned data centres, and now hears an appeal from an application lodged the day before Open doorQ10
Smithfield Town Hall, 64 Farnum Pike, Smithfield, Providence County, Rhode Island, United States
The town's administrative officer decided on 11 June that a major land development application for the Smithfield Corporate Complex, at 364 George Washington Highway, was incomplete, issuing a second certificate of incompleteness. The developers, Hanton City Investments LLC and ROK LLC, are appealing that decision, and the zoning board of review sits as the board of appeals to hear it. The hearing was put off once from 2 September and the town has now published it in its own notice of public hearings: Wednesday 7 October at 6pm at the town hall, which is the venue and the hour this entry could not give before. The plans are expected to include a data centre. The timing is the whole of it. The application went in the day before the town council met and voted to adopt an ordinance banning data centres in Smithfield, so the appeal is about whether a proposal lodged on the last day before a door shut gets to be treated as though the door were still open. A ban is on the books and the proposal has not gone away, which is worth setting beside the pauses elsewhere on this page: passing the rule did not settle it here.
Cleveland has one evening left, and nine days after it the pause runs out Open doorQ10
Gunning Recreation Center, 16700 Puritas Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio, United States
The city council put a three-month stop on new standalone data centres and on expansions, and alongside it published three evening meetings for residents, each in a different part of the city rather than all of them at City Hall. Two have now been held: the Collinwood Recreation Center on 24 September, and City Hall on 29 September from 5pm to 8pm, where the council took speakers on a rolling basis. No account of either has been published. The third, which the council calls the final meeting in the series, is at the Gunning Recreation Center on 7 October from 6pm to 8pm, and the practical detail for anyone going is that sign-up for speaking slots opens at 5:30pm, half an hour before it starts. City officials and industry people attend, and residents are asked for their views in the room. What has to be settled before the pause runs out is whether new zoning or operating standards are adopted at all, and the council has named what it is looking at: electricity demand, water use, environmental effects, noise, siting near homes, and whether to write a separate definition for hyperscale facilities. There is a building behind the argument, which earlier reporting did not name: Lakeland Equity Group, based in Westlake, is proposing what would be Cleveland's first hyperscale data centre on East 55th Street, on the old Morabito Enterprises property. One discrepancy is worth carrying rather than smoothing over, because it changes how many days are left. The city's own announcement says the pause holds through 16 October, with room for the council to extend it by up to three further months. Signal Cleveland gave the expiry as 20 October, and Ideastream now gives 20 October as well, so two outlets are on that date against the city's one. The date on this page stays the city's own, so anyone timing something to land before it should treat 16 October as the deadline and the four days after it as a maybe.
Kenya's communications regulator proposes a licence of their own for data centres Open door
Kenya, by online form, by email, or by post or hand to the Communications Authority in Nairobi
The Communications Authority of Kenya published a consultation on 8 September proposing a standalone licence for colocation data centres, which are buildings that rent out space, power and cooling to other companies' servers. At present they sit in a licence category built for companies that lay and run telecommunications networks, and the regulator says a dedicated licence would give clearer oversight of the facilities while dropping requirements written for telecoms operators. The proposed fees are 5,000 Kenyan shillings to apply, about A$54, and 100,000 shillings for the licence, about A$1,086, then 80,000 shillings a year, about A$869, or 0.4 per cent of gross annual turnover, whichever is higher, over a fifteen-year term. Those conversions use the reported US dollar figures and 1.406 Australian dollars to the US dollar on 14 September 2026. The authority gave thirty days from publication for written comments, and the reporting describes it as open to operators, investors, technology companies and interested members of the public. The notice as reported gives no calendar date for the close; counting thirty days from 8 September reaches 8 October, which is the date the calendar above uses, so treat it as the last safe day rather than a published one. The reporting does not mention conditions on energy, water or where data is held, which is worth noticing in the same country whose Senate, further up this page, is asking how the public should be asked.
Nye County writes data centres into a code that has no word for them, and sits in two towns at once to hear about it Open doorQ10
Nye County Commissioners' Chambers, 2100 Walt Williams Drive, Pahrump, and 101 Radar Road, Tonopah, Nevada, United States, and by teleconference
The county commission holds a special meeting on 8 October at 10am to take the public on Nye County Bill No. 2026-14, which would amend Title 17 of the county code by adding land use regulations, special use permit requirements and development standards for data centre facilities. It runs to 46 pages and covers zoning restrictions, permit requirements, site plans, water consumption standards and construction specifications, and it would apply across the county apart from Pahrump, where data centres are already banned. The hearing was first set for 14 September and cancelled, because the district attorney's office had not finished its legal review of the bill in time. Two details are worth marking beside the bigger entries on this page. The sitting runs in two chambers at once, in Pahrump and in Tonopah, with a teleconference line as well, in a county large enough that one room would put most of the people it governs hours away from the microphone. And the ban in Pahrump means the county is writing rules for the ground outside the town that already said no, which is the same shape as Woodbury County in Iowa further down: the rules reach the land that starts where somebody else's rulebook stops.
Australia opens the design of its national AI standards, and the data centre rules are a third of what is in them Open doorQ9Q10
Australia, by online submission form to the Office of AI
The Prime Minister announced national AI standards in a speech on 15 July and left the detail open. This is where the detail gets written, and it is the first door on this page that reaches the rules themselves rather than a report about them. Two things are in scope. The first is a set of mandatory minimum requirements for large data centres, covering the power they draw and who pays to connect them to the grid, energy efficiency, water use, where they are sited, how they engage the community around them, and skills. As reported, the government's position is that a large AI data centre would have to underwrite its own additional power supply and pay the full cost of connecting to the electricity network, so the growth does not land on household bills, and would have to cut its electricity use when the grid needs it to. The second is conditions on frontier AI model training done in Australia: safety, security, transparency and local investment. The Office of AI, which runs the consultation, sits inside the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. The Minister for Industry and Innovation, Tim Ayres, put the reason for it this way: that by setting high standards now, Australia can shape the future of this technology rather than adopt standards made overseas. The government has said it means to put the standards to parliament early in 2027, so what the consultation changes, it changes before a Bill exists. Two things belong beside it. The announcement in July included a requirement that new data centre builds be fully powered by new renewable energy, and that was dropped after the Queensland and Northern Territory governments pushed back, so one of the larger questions has already moved once. And the paper itself is now published, which is what this entry could not give before. It is called Getting it right: Building AI infrastructure that works for Australia, it is on the department's site as a PDF, and it comes in three parts: managing growth in large data centres and the AI training opportunity, requirements for large data centres, and conditions for AI training. Submissions close at 5pm Australian Eastern Daylight Time on Friday 9 October and go through an online form, so there is a named place for an answer to land rather than a page to keep checking. One subject in it was not visible in the first reporting and is worth naming: the paper asks how Australian creatives and copyright holders can be supported under the conditions for AI training, which is the question the Singapore and European consultations further down this page ask on their own. It joins four other Australian processes on this page: the Senate's hearings, now with Darwin left, the Joint Select Committee sitting in Sydney on 6 October, Tasmania's parliamentary inquiry reporting on 16 November and Tasmania's own draft expectations closing on 12 October. Two of the five are still taking submissions, and this is the one that reaches furthest.
Palm Springs holds forty-five days, and the valley around it has already gone further Q10
Palm Springs, Riverside County, California, United States
The city council adopted an urgency ordinance in late August putting a 45-day stop on the city accepting, processing or approving any application, permit or approval for a data centre, running through 10 October, while it works out what to do about them inside the citywide zoning code update already under way. What makes it worth marking is the map around it rather than the city itself. Indio and Desert Hot Springs have taken the same temporary step, and Coachella has gone further and prohibited data centres outright. So four cities in one valley have moved within weeks of each other, three holding the ground and one closing it. This carries no door chip: no hearing or comment window is published against the October date, and the council's agenda is where the next step will appear.
Escondido gave itself forty-five days, and they run out in October Q10
Escondido, San Diego County, California, United States
The city council voted unanimously in late August for an urgency ordinance putting a 45-day stop on data centres, which the council and city staff described as a matter of public health and safety. What it buys is time to write land use and zoning rules for data centres and other high-intensity computing uses. The reporting gives 10 October as the date staff return to the council with their progress, which is where the 45 days run out, and two extensions are available to the council if it needs them, one of ten months and one of twelve. The senior planner set out what the time is for: research on the effects of these uses, outreach to stakeholders and the community, and drafting rules on where such facilities may be established, sited and operated. The outreach is the part with nothing published against it. No date, format or way in has been given for it, and a 45-day pause leaves little room for one, which is why the ten and twelve month extensions matter more than they look. This carries no door chip for that reason; the council's own agenda is where the sitting and its papers will appear.
Tasmania asks what it should expect of a data centre, having just had 152 submissions on whether the rules work Open doorQ10
Tasmania, Australia, by online survey or written submission
The state government published a draft Statement of Expectations for Data Centres and AI Infrastructure on 7 September and takes responses until 11.59pm on Monday 12 October, through an online survey or a written submission. What the draft asks of a developer is set out plainly: genuine community engagement, responsible water use, and compliance with the planning and approval processes the state already has. On energy it asks that a new project support additional renewable generation, meet its share of network and connection costs, and run in a way that protects energy security and grid stability. The government's stated purpose is to give guidance and confidence to proponents, investors, industry, communities and other stakeholders, so the invitation reaches past the companies it is addressed to. One distinction is worth holding while reading it. A statement of expectations tells a developer what a government wants. Whether any of it binds is a separate question, and the draft is the text to answer on that. What sits underneath is the same set of buildings the House of Assembly is inquiring into further up this page, which closed its own submissions on 21 September with 152 received: Firmus Technologies with three sites and about 400 megawatts of planned demand, and six further proposals whose companies are kept confidential, together needing at least 500 megawatts. A kettle draws about two kilowatts, so that second figure alone is roughly two hundred and fifty thousand kettles boiling at once. Two doors in one small state, three weeks apart, on the same question asked two ways: one by the parliament, one by the government.
Charlotte finished its six sessions, then set one more hearing on whether to keep the pause at all Open doorQ10
Charlotte, North Carolina, United States
The city put a 150-day stop on new data centre approvals in June, running to 5 November, and before it lifts the council has to propose changes, hold a public hearing and put new policy in place. Six sessions in September were where residents got asked first, and all six have now been held: at Hornets Nest Park on 2 September, at the One Water facility on West Tyvola Road on 10 September, at Project 658 on Central Avenue on 15 September, on Zoom on 25 September, at University City United Methodist Church on 26 September, and on Zoom again on 29 September. That series is finished, and this entry would have moved to what already came with it. What changed is that on 28 September the council voted to set a further public hearing for 12 October, described as a last say for residents before the council decides whether to extend the pause well into 2027. The extension now has a date on it rather than only a length: reporting puts it at holding the pause through 11 October 2027. Earlier reporting described the extension as a further nine months and the date gives something closer to eleven, so the date is the thing to read and the length is not settled in what has been published. The city says it wants more time to read research by the World Resources Institute on what these buildings do, and to work on regulatory tools such as capacity verification and cooling standards. In August it set up a nineteen-person task force to help draft recommendations, and several people on its panels had been through the September meetings. So the question on 12 October is not what the rules should say. It is whether the city gets another nine months to work out what the rules should say, which is a different thing to turn up and speak about, and it is the second time on this page that a decision has been put back rather than taken.
A free hour on Indigenous data sovereignty in health research, run from Queensland Q9
Online, run by Health Translation Queensland
Health Translation Queensland runs a one-hour online workshop on Indigenous Data Sovereignty, which is the right of Indigenous Peoples to own and control data about them, their communities and their Country, and on Indigenous Data Governance, which is how that right is put into practice. It is presented by Shevaun Wright, a senior associate at Terri Janke and Company, and it is aimed at health researchers and people working in health. Registration is through Eventbrite. Two details are worth knowing before booking. The session is not recorded, and the slides go only to people who attend. And it is a workshop, and no submissions are being asked for. It is on this page because it is the practical end of the same question the UN Permanent Forum and the Expert Mechanism take up further down: what consent over data looks like when someone actually has to write it into a research project.
United States asks how to rebuild its vulnerability database for machines to read Open doorQ9
United States, online through the federal rulemaking portal
The National Institute of Standards and Technology opened a request for information on 12 August on modernising the National Vulnerability Database, the public catalogue of known software flaws that security tools around the world read from. It asks how to improve the quality, governance and machine-readability of that data, how AI tools should be used to find and fix flaws earlier while keeping human oversight, and what the database should be able to do over the next five years. The reason it is being asked now is worth stating plainly: AI has made it much faster to find flaws, and the shared catalogue cannot keep up with the volume. Comments go through regulations.gov under docket NIST-2026-0100, and anyone may send one.
Sioux County reads its rules three times, and says they would hold a data centre to a higher standard than any business in the county Q10
Board of Supervisors' Room, Sioux County Courthouse, 210 Central Avenue SW, Orange City, Iowa, United States
The county is amending its zoning ordinance to cover data centres, and it takes three readings to do it. The first was on 29 September at 9am, and the county opened that one to residents to weigh in. The second reading is on 13 October at 9am and the third and final reading on 27 October at 9am, both in the same room. What the amendment asks for is set out by the county's zoning director, Shane Walter, who describes the rules as stringent and says such a facility would be held to a much higher standard than any business currently in Sioux County. The requirements named are water consumption, electrical needs, noise levels, independent studies, closed-loop cooling systems, and funding for emergency responder training and equipment. Two of those are rarer than they look. A closed-loop cooling system recirculates its water rather than drawing fresh supply and losing it to evaporation, so it is the difference between a building that borrows water and one that consumes it. And making the developer pay to train and equip the people who would answer a fire there is a cost few of the drafts on this page name at all. This carries no door chip, on the same reading as Aberdeen further down: the reporting confirms the public could speak at the first reading and does not say whether the second and third take comment, so the county's own agenda is the thing to check before travelling.
Adair County is writing data centre rules before anybody has proposed one Open doorQ10
Adair County Board of Supervisors, Adair County, Iowa, United States
The supervisors are working through an ordinance regulating the siting, construction, operation and decommissioning of data centres and cryptocurrency mining facilities in the unincorporated parts of the county. A public hearing on 23 September ran about an hour, and several residents spoke, raising noise and water use. The next public hearing is on 14 October at 9:15am. What the draft asks for is specific. A facility would sit at least 1,000 feet from a property line and 2,600 feet from an occupied home, and would have to meet noise standards, be built on permanent foundations, and put up financial assurances. Two thousand six hundred feet is about 790 metres, so roughly eight football fields between the machines and the nearest kitchen window. Decommissioning is named in the ordinance itself, which puts Adair alongside Bay City and Missoula County on this page as one of the few places asking what the building becomes, and who pays to take it away, once the machines are no longer wanted. The part worth holding is the sequence. The supervisors say no developer has approached the county with plans to build a data centre here. So this is a county writing the rule before the proposal arrives, which is the opposite of nearly every other entry on this page, where the rule is being written against a building already drawn. The venue is not given in the reporting, and the county publishes its own hearing notices, which is where it will appear.
Spokane County heard the pause in September, and hears the rules meant to replace it in October Open doorQ10
County Commissioners' Hearing Room, Spokane County, Washington, United States
Two hearings were published, and they were on different questions. On 15 September at 2pm the county commissioners heard the public on the pause the county has put on data centre land use and permit applications; anyone testifying got three minutes, and could only address the pause. No account of that sitting has been published. The one still ahead is the larger of the two. On 15 October at 4:30pm the planning commission hears the public on the proposed data centre zoning code, which is the text meant to replace the pause, and it sits in the same room. A planning commission work session fell between them on 17 September, and it was not a hearing, so it was not a place to speak. The narrowing on the September date is the part worth reading twice: residents came to the county asking for a moratorium, and the hearing they were given was about the moratorium alone, with the rules that follow it held for a month. Those rules are what is on the table now.
UNESCO asks who governs the AI tools arriving in classrooms, and one of its six papers is on sovereignty Open doorQ9
Online, by email to UNESCO's AI and education team
UNESCO opened a global consultation on AI governance in education ahead of its Digital Learning Week in September, and takes comments until 15 October. What is being consulted on is a discussion paper and six background papers, and the question the discussion paper puts is the one worth repeating: what it takes for an education system to exercise agency in the face of rapid AI diffusion, and to govern these tools so that education keeps its public purpose. It names six directional shifts by which that purpose is undermined when AI use is ungoverned. The six background papers are where it gets specific, and one of them belongs to this site's own subject matter: digital and AI sovereignty, alongside age-appropriate AI, learner safety, AI procurement, the total cost of AI in an education system, and the right to an explanation in AI-enabled education. Procurement and total cost are the two rarely asked anywhere on this page: who chose the tool, and what the whole bill is once the licence, the devices and the staff time are counted. Comments go by email to aied@unesco.org, and the invitation names experts, academics, government officials and other stakeholders, so a person writing on their own account is relying on the word other, as at the British energy call for evidence further down. The consultation window runs from September to November while the comment deadline is 15 October, which the page does not reconcile; 15 October is the date to work to. What it feeds is a set of policy briefs to be released at Digital Learning Week in 2027, so this is the stage before the guidance exists rather than a comment period on a finished text.
Brazil asks the public which rules its data protection authority should write next Open doorQ9
Brazil, through the federal Brasil Participativo platform
The Autoridade Nacional de Proteção de Dados opened a call for suggestions on 1 September towards its regulatory agenda for 2027 and 2028, and it closes on 16 October. It names citizens, researchers, companies, civil society organisations and public institutions among those it is asking, and contributions go through Brasil Participativo, the federal government's own participation platform, rather than through a form only a lawyer would find. The proposed subjects reach artificial intelligence twice over. One axis is a safe digital environment for children, adolescents and women, covering supervision by carers, safe-design standards for platforms and what companies have to disclose, and inside it the authority names the use of artificial intelligence by children and adolescents and the generation of illicit content by AI tools. The other is data protection itself: the rights of the person the data is about, facial recognition, health information and automated decision-making. The authority's remit has grown to take in Brazil's statute on children and adolescents in digital environments, which is why those two sit together. What makes this different from most doors on this page is where it sits in the sequence. Almost every other one here asks what a person thinks of a rule already drafted. This asks which rules get drafted at all, which is a step earlier and harder to get to. The agenda has to be approved by 1 February 2027, so what goes in now is decided within months.
Plymouth puts a one-year pause on the warrant, and a hundred and sixty-two residents vote it Q10
Plymouth, Plymouth County, Massachusetts, United States
The select board voted unanimously on 25 August to recommend Article 16 to the town's fall annual town meeting: a one-year zoning moratorium on standalone commercial data centres, running from 17 October 2026 to 16 October 2027. It reaches dedicated server farms and large-scale facilities and leaves alone data storage attached to something else, such as a hospital or a research laboratory. What the year is for is set out. The planning board and the planning and development department are to work with Eversource and the town water department on grid capacity, water demand, noise and the local infrastructure that comes with these buildings, and to bring permanent zoning rules back afterwards. Who decides is the part worth reading. Plymouth's legislative body is a representative town meeting of 162 members, nine elected from each of eighteen precincts on staggered three-year terms, with a moderator who votes only to break a tie. So the pause is not settled by a council of a handful of people, as almost every other American entry on this page is, but by a body of residents elected street by street. The town publishes the date on its own page. Its bylaw puts the fall annual town meeting in the last four months of the year, and the select board may move it, so the warrant page is still the thing to check before travelling.
The United States takes comments on a data centre proposed for the sea floor Open doorQ10
United States, through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's filing system
The commission accepted for filing on 19 August a preliminary permit application from DeepGreen Western Passage SPV LLC, and the notice published in the Federal Register on 25 August solicits comments, motions to intervene, competing applications and notices of intent to file one, all due by 19 October. A preliminary permit is not permission to build: it holds a site for up to forty-eight months while the applicant does the engineering and environmental studies needed to raise money and apply properly. What is being held is about twenty-seven acres of sea floor in Western Passage in the Bay of Fundy, for tidal-powered underwater artificial intelligence data centres put at a hundred million dollars. This is the federal half of the Eastport entry above. The town has paused data centres for 180 days and its planning board has recommended banning them outright; the commission's window opened a week after that pause was adopted, and it is the door through which someone outside the town can be heard on the same proposal. Accepting an application for filing does not mean the permit will be granted.
The United States asks what to require of a medical device built on a generative model Open doorQ9
United States, through the federal rulemaking portal
The Food and Drug Administration's device centre published a discussion paper on 18 August, Considerations for the Regulation of Generative AI-Enabled Medical Devices, and opened it for comment until 19 October under docket FDA-2026-N-7874 on regulations.gov. It puts up two things for argument. One is a way of sorting risk on two axes at once, by how much a device matters clinically and by how much it decides on its own. The other is a premarket test it calls a competency assessment, modelled on how a doctor is trained: benchmarking outside the clinic first, then confirmation inside it. Two of the questions it asks reach furthest. Where a manufacturer builds on a foundation model it did not make and does not control, who carries the duties before and after the device goes on the market. And how a system that does not give the same answer twice is watched once it is in use, when the model underneath it can change without the manufacturer changing anything. The agency says this is a paper for discussion rather than draft guidance, so nothing is settled and the wording can still move, and it names device makers, clinicians, researchers and the public among those it wants to hear from. It sits on this page because it is the one door here about artificial intelligence inside a hospital rather than beside a substation.
Scarborough has a definition of a data centre with no size in it Open doorQ10
Scarborough, Cumberland County, Maine, United States
The town council has sent a draft data centre ordinance to the planning board, which holds a public hearing on it on 19 October before it comes back to the council on 21 October. The draft borrows its definition of a data centre from a regional council of governments model, and that definition explicitly leaves out small server rooms and similar uses. What it does not carry is a size threshold, and committee members have flagged that as something the draft may need. That gap is the thing worth speaking to on 19 October, and it is unusually easy to speak to: a rule that says what a data centre is not, without saying how big a building has to be before it counts as one, leaves the line to be drawn later by whoever is reading the ordinance at the time. Most of the drafts on this page argue over water, power and setbacks. This one is still at the stage before that, where what is being decided is which buildings the rest of the argument will apply to.
Aberdeen heard nineteen residents, and now writes its ordinance on a published timetable Q10
Aberdeen, Brown County, South Dakota, United States
The last of the city's three listening meetings was held on 14 September at the Civic Theatre and is recorded in what already came. The timetable that follows it was published by the Aberdeen Insider before the meeting, and it is specific. City staff reported on 21 September on what data centres mean for zoning, housing, water and electricity use, and nuisances, and the council's framework discussions on 21 and 28 September and 5 October have been held; no account of any of them has been published. The dates still ahead start with the planning commission, which reviews the draft on 20 October. First reading is set for 26 October and a possible final approval for 2 November, and the ordinance is expected to take effect on 25 November unless it is referred to a public vote. The moratorium on data centre permits runs out on 18 November, a week before that effective date, which is the gap the city attorney described in August. Several of the residents who spoke on 14 September asked for the moratorium to be extended past November, so whether the council takes that up is the first thing to look for in the dates above. This carries no door chip because the published timetable does not say which of those sittings take public comment; the council and planning commission agendas are where that will appear.
Cumberland County wrote the tightest draft on this page, and has eight weeks to adopt it Q10
Cumberland County Joint Planning Board, Cumberland County, North Carolina, United States
The county has been at this since early 2026, through work sessions, a special meeting and public comment period on 23 March, a public hearing on 18 May, a six-month moratorium adopted on 15 June, two community input sessions and an online comment form. The draft ordinance went to the Joint Planning Board on 15 September, and the board next meets on 20 October, where it can discuss and vote on it. The moratorium runs out on 15 December and the county's stated goal is to have rules adopted by then, so the run between those two dates is short. What the draft asks for is the strictest set on this page, and it is worth listing because most of the drafts here reach two or three of these and this one reaches all of them. Data centres only on manufacturing-zoned land and only by conditional approval. Buildings 500 feet from a property line, 750 feet where the neighbour is housing or an agricultural preservation district, and 1,250 feet from a school, hospital, nursing home or place of worship. Noise capped at 60 decibels at the property line and 45 where it adjoins homes, which is about the level of a quiet conversation. Public utility water only, with no wells and no surface water, and evaporative cooling prohibited outright in favour of closed-loop systems, so the building recirculates its water rather than drinking the town's. Nuclear reactors prohibited. Backup generator testing confined to 9am to 7pm on weekdays and barred on public holidays. And the developer has to show the water and electricity exist before it builds. This carries no door chip for the usual reason on this page: the reporting sets out what the board will consider and does not say whether it takes public comment on the day, so the board's own agenda is the thing to check.
The United States asks whether computing power should be traded like wheat Open doorQ9
United States, through the commission's comment portal
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees futures and derivatives markets, announced on 19 August that it wants comment on the listing of compute derivatives contracts, and the request was published in the Federal Register on 21 August with a sixty-day window. A derivative is a contract whose value follows something else, and what is being contemplated here is contracts that follow the price of computing power itself. The commission asks about the size and liquidity of the underlying cash markets in compute, about market oversight and manipulation, about customer protection, and about perpetual compute futures. It matters on this page because it is the same subject as the council chambers further up, taken to its other end. Those meetings ask where the machines are built and who pays for the power; this asks whether the output of those machines becomes something bought and sold ahead of time by people a long way from the site. The commission says it is an early step before any rules are drafted, which is the point at which a comment can still change the shape of what follows, and anyone may file one.
A conference in Wellington opens a track for Indigenous research, and takes submissions until October Open doorQ9
Submissions online, for a conference at Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand
iConference is the yearly meeting of the iSchools organisation, which is a network of university schools working on information, data and libraries. The 2027 meeting is co-hosted by Victoria University of Wellington and Monash University, under the theme He rā ki tua, and runs in two parts: an online programme from 22 to 25 March 2027 and an on-site programme in Wellington from 5 to 9 April 2027. What puts it on this page is a track the conference has added for the first time. The Indigenous Research track is described as bringing together scholarship and practice on Indigenous knowledge systems, data sovereignty and information governance, with Indigenous perspectives on archives, libraries and digital environments, and it says it welcomes work advancing Indigenous self-determination and community-led approaches. Two of the three tests this page uses are easily met and the third is worth saying plainly: this is a call for papers, not a government consultation, so what it decides is what gets said at a conference rather than what goes into a rule. It is still a published window in which somebody outside the organising committee can put work forward and have it considered, on the subject the rest of this page keeps arriving at from the regulatory end. The deadline for the general research papers was 15 September and has passed. The Indigenous Research Papers deadline is 20 October, and workshops, panels, the doctoral colloquium and the early career colloquium share that date. Submissions go through the Conftool portal, and registration is said to open in the middle of November. One caution on sourcing. The conference's own site did not answer this scan, so the dates and the track description here come from the call for papers published by iSchools, which is the body that runs the conference.
Singapore asks what is owed to the people whose work a model was trained on Open doorQ9
Singapore, online form or by email to the Ministry of Law
The Ministry of Law and the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore opened a consultation on 26 August on what artificial intelligence does to the country's intellectual property regime. Five questions are put, three on copyright and two on patents. The copyright ones ask who is accountable for the material a model is trained on, how the risk of infringement should be managed, and where human creativity sits in a work made with a machine's help. The patent ones ask whether the existing principles of who counts as an inventor still hold, and what it does to prior art when a machine can generate technical disclosures faster than anyone can read them. It belongs on this page for two reasons. Asia barely appears here, and this asks the question the rest of the page does not: the council chambers above argue over where the machines are built and who pays for their power, and this asks what is owed to the people whose work went into them. Submissions go through separate online forms for copyright and for patents, or by email, and close at 5pm. One caution before writing. The ministry reserves the right to publish all or part of a submission and to name who sent it; anything commercially sensitive has to be marked in a separate annex, and confidentiality cannot be claimed over substantially all of a submission.
Oregon has held its last listening session, and the written window on its draft findings runs to 24 October Open doorQ10
Online by Zoom, run by the Oregon Data Center Advisory Committee, United States
The committee was convened by the Governor in January to advise her and the legislature on data centre growth in a state that has a great deal of it. It held seven meetings and three public listening sessions, the last of them online from 4pm to 7pm Pacific time on Saturday 26 September, where anyone could speak for three minutes on the committee's preliminary findings. That session has been held and no account of it has been published. What remains is the written door, which is the one that takes more than three minutes of thought, and it now has the date this entry could not give it before. The committee released its Preliminary Learnings and Questions document on 10 September and opened a 45 day comment period with it, closing at 5pm Pacific time on 24 October. Anyone can write in through the online form, and the committee takes an email at datacenter.ac@oregon.gov. Reporting on the document describes nine months of work producing many questions and few answers, with concerns raised about tax breaks and water use, so what is out for comment is a set of open questions rather than a set of conclusions. What comes after is recommendations to the Governor and the legislature, which is the checkable part: a set of findings taken to the public before they harden into advice, rather than after.
Colorado takes comments on the rules under its AI and chatbot laws Open doorQ9
1300 Broadway, Denver, Colorado, United States, and by videoconference
Proposed rules were filed on 11 August to implement two state laws: the Automated Decision-Making Technology Act, which is the revised version of the Colorado AI Act, and the Chatbot Safety Act. The rules cover how automated systems may be used in decisions about people, including in hiring and employment. Two dates matter. Comments sent by 4 September are considered for any revisions put to the hearing. The hearing itself is on 26 October at 10am, in person and by videoconference, and written comments stay open until 11:59pm Mountain time that day. This is one of the few places on this page where a person can read a draft rule and answer it clause by clause before it binds anyone.
Davidson County deadlocked on a pause in August, and brings a shorter one back in October Open doorQ10
Davidson County Board of Commissioners, Davidson County, North Carolina, United States
On 24 August the commissioners split three votes to three on a six-month stop on data centre development, and a tied vote carries nothing, so it failed. Five weeks later, on 28 September, Commissioner Tripp Kester moved to bring it back, and the board voted four to two to put a four-month version on its agenda for 26 October. Kester gave the reason in his own words: that the county needs time to investigate the situation thoroughly and to let citizens have input, rather than push something through before anyone has had time to weigh the pluses and minuses. Commission chair Karen Watford voted against, saying a pause would signal the wrong thing to business and send the data centres, and the money with them, to a neighbouring county. Two things belong beside the date. The two reports differ on what 26 October actually is: WFMY describes the board as voting to hold a public hearing and gives that date, while WFDD describes it as scheduling the moratorium as an agenda item to be revisited. Both agree on the date, the four months and the four to two vote, so the date is sound and the format is not; the county's published agenda is what settles whether residents may speak. And the shape of the change is worth noticing on its own, because it runs against the pattern elsewhere on this page. Most councils here are shortening the time they give people. This board added a month of delay to its own decision and cut two months off the pause it is asking for.
Denton has held the first of its two hearings, and the arithmetic changes at the second Open doorQ10
Denton, Texas, United States
The council voted four to three on 18 August to proceed with a possible ninety-day pause on data centre approvals and with amendments to the development code, and fixed the dates that had been proposed a fortnight earlier. The first public hearing was held on 22 September, and what came of it is on the record: twenty people spoke and all twenty supported the ninety-day pause, on concerns about the strain on city resources. The second hearing is set for 27 October and final adoption for 2 December. Residents can speak at both hearings, so one of the two chances to do that is still ahead, and the first one gives some measure of who turns up when a council asks. The council's own utility warned that the grid is close to capacity, which is what put this in motion. Adopting the pause takes a supermajority of the council, not the four votes that have carried it this far, so the arithmetic in December is different from the arithmetic in August.
Frederick County took data centres out of its rulebook, and kept a door open for two of them until 28 October Open doorQ10
County Administration Building, Frederick County, Virginia, United States
On 23 September the board of supervisors voted six to one to remove data centres as a permitted or conditional use in every zoning district in the county, striking the definitions and the regulations out of the ordinance with the same vote. Reporting describes Frederick County as the first locality in Virginia to restrict data centre development this way. In the same sitting the supervisors passed a resolution, unanimously, grandfathering two data centre proposals already under review, on one condition: those applicants have to come before the board at a public hearing by 28 October. That hearing is what this entry is for, and it is the last place in the county where the question can be argued in public, because after it the ordinance has no category for a new one. The 72 acre Winchester Gateway campus is not one of the two. Its applicant pulled the conditional use permit the day before the meeting, so it was never refused; it was withdrawn. Anyone following this should watch the county's meeting portal for which of the two proposals is listed and when, because the date is a deadline rather than a fixed sitting, and written comment through the county's e-comment system goes on the record and reaches the supervisors before they vote.
The UN human rights office asks about children and safety in digital spaces Open doorQ9
Online, submissions to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
A call for inputs on child rights and safety in the digital environment is listed as open with a closing date of 30 October. The office has been running focus groups with children themselves on their rights in the digital world, and the standing framework it works from is general comment No. 25, adopted by the Committee on the Rights of the Child in 2021, which covers privacy, safety, participation, non-discrimination, education, play and protection from exploitation. Two cautions belong with this entry. The opening date is not given on the listing, and while the listing itself opened to this scan and confirms the 30 October date, the individual call page still refuses automated reading, so the detail here comes from the listing rather than the call document; anyone planning to write should open the call page directly and read the questions and the page limit before starting.
Europe asks who may scrape the web to build a generative model Open doorQ9
European Union, through the board's online form
The European Data Protection Board, which is the body the national data protection authorities sit on together, adopted draft Guidelines 03/2026 on web scraping in the context of generative AI on 7 July and opened them for public consultation the following day. Web scraping here means running automated tools across publicly reachable web pages and taking what is on them, and the guidelines deal with what happens when the material taken includes personal data about people who were never asked. They cover a company scraping sources outside itself, a company paying somebody else to do the scraping, and a company buying a dataset from a broker that was built that way. Two things make this one of the wider doors on the page. It reaches every member state at once, because the guidelines are what the national regulators will read from afterwards. And the board names individuals in the list of who may contribute, alongside academic institutions, businesses, consumer organisations, non-government organisations, public authorities and professional associations. Contributions are published on the board's site, with an option to withhold your personal details, and they go through a form with room for an attached document.
Uruguay reopens its consultation with children on digital life and AI, after passing four thousand contributions Open doorQ9
Uruguay, online through the citizen participation platform, and in person
This consultation was due to close on 10 September and was moved to what already came. It has been extended to 30 October, which is why it is back on this page; the earlier entry stays in the record beside it. The parliament runs it with the national council on the rights of children, the digital agency Agesic, Ceibal, UNICEF and UNDP, and it asks what digital environments and artificial intelligence do to children and adolescents. The reason given for the extension is that participation went past what the organisers expected. The technical adviser, Lydia Garrido, counted 668 online responses and 17 public proposals on the platform and more than 2,300 contributions through workshops and other activities, with a national survey of 1,500 cases and a consultation with young people alongside. Representative Rodrigo Goñi said organisations were still finding out about it and taking it up. The method is the part worth keeping, as it was the first time: separate sittings for children and adolescents in formats matched to their age, beside the open form. One thing moves with the date. The published timetable had analysis running from 10 September to 20 October and a final report on 30 November, and the extension now runs past the end of that analysis window. Legislators say they aim to finish the legislative work by the end of 2026; whether the report date moves has not been published.
UNESCO asks early-career researchers what the ethics of AI looks like from their work Open doorQ9
Submissions online, for a gathering in Paris, France
UNESCO and the AI and Society Institute at the École normale supérieure in Paris have a call for papers open until 30 October. Proposals are to present research on the ethics of artificial intelligence grounded in UNESCO's 2021 Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, and the subjects named run to fairness, human rights, governance, social inclusion, gender equality and sustainable development. Selected work is presented at an academic gathering in Paris on 10 December, alongside expert talks and moderated discussion. Be clear about who this is open to, because it is narrower than most doors here: it is for researchers who finished a doctorate within the past five years, and a co-authored proposal needs both authors to meet that test. Successful applicants are told by 15 November and write a full paper of roughly five to seven thousand words by 1 December. It is on this page because of which body is asking. The 2021 Recommendation is the instrument nearly two hundred states have signed up to on AI ethics, and this is UNESCO going looking for the people who have done the work rather than waiting to be sent it. A call for papers decides what gets said in a room in Paris, not what goes into a law, so it sits lower than a government consultation; it is still a published window in which somebody outside the institution can put work forward and have it counted.
A UN mandate asks the public what it should work on for the next three years Open doorQ9
Online, submissions to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
The UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Leopoldo Maldonado Gutiérrez, has a call for inputs open until 31 October. What comes in feeds a vision-setting report to the Human Rights Council in June 2027 and sets the mandate's strategic priorities for 2026 to 2029. Among the changes the call names as reshaping the field are rapid technological change and the evolution of digital information ecosystems, which is the ground this mandate has already covered in its own thematic reports on artificial intelligence and the information environment. It sits on this page for the same reason the Brazilian one further up does: almost every other door here asks what a person thinks of a rule already drafted, and this asks what gets worked on at all, which is a step earlier and rarer to find open. Three years of a UN mandate's attention is what is being allocated. One caution, and it is the same one this page carries on every OHCHR entry. The individual call page refuses automated reading, so the closing date here comes from the office's own calls for input listing, which does open, and the detail from reporting on the call; anyone planning to write should open the call page directly and read the questions and any page limit before starting.
The continental forum, hosted by the Government of Ghana. The call that let an outsider shape the programme closed on 31 July, and it was addressed widely: policymakers, researchers, youth leaders, civil society advocates, technical experts, academics, parliamentarians, members of the judiciary and private sector representatives, as organisations, institutions, networks or individuals. What is left now is to register and attend. It sits five weeks before the global Internet Governance Forum in Nairobi, so the two together are the year's clearest picture of what the continent brings to a conversation the rest of the world holds in December.
Cape Town International Convention Centre, Cape Town, South Africa
Convened by AiForAfrica International Inc., based in New York, with partners including the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and NVIDIA. About 1,500 attendees are expected, described as heads of state, Fortune 500 executives, institutional investors, venture capitalists and AI innovators, with the chief executives of NVIDIA, Microsoft, Google and OpenAI listed as speakers. Entry is by application through an invitation process, and no call for papers, sessions or speakers is published. It runs in the same week as the Africa Internet Governance Forum in Accra, and the two are worth reading side by side: one is convened from New York around capital and the firms that hold it, the other is hosted by a government and opened its programme to individuals.
Australia's Senate took its data centre inquiry to the suburbs, and has Darwin left Q9Q10
Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia, after hearings at Lane Cove in Sydney, Yarraville in Melbourne and Parliament House in Canberra
The Senate referred artificial intelligence and data centres to its Environment and Communications References Committee on 13 May, chaired by Senator Sarah Hanson-Young. Submissions closed on 1 September, so that door is shut. Three hearing days have now been held, and only one of them in the capital: Lane Cove in Sydney on 22 September, the Yarraville Community Centre in Melbourne on 23 September, and Parliament House in Canberra on 1 October. Taking the inquiry to the suburbs where these buildings are going up is the part worth keeping. Reporting from the Yarraville day has residents living near a NextDC facility asking to be compensated, which is the question of what a neighbour is owed rather than whether a building is allowed, and the chair backed putting compensation on the table while asking what the community benefit from these facilities is. Councils told the committee that data centres are outpacing their planning controls, and are arriving on prime land. Who did not come to Canberra is on the record: the chair wrote to Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dario Amodei of Anthropic asking them to appear, and both companies said their chief executives would not attend, citing the notice given being too short to arrange the travel. OpenAI sends its chief strategy officer, Jason Kwon, to a different committee in Sydney five days later, which is the Joint Select Committee entry further down this page. Two firms declining a parliament's invitation and accepting another one the same week is worth holding beside the rest of this page, where residents are given two minutes or three to speak in a room they can walk to. What is lodged in writing is substantial and is published as it is accepted, which is the part a person can read without travelling anywhere: Microsoft, Google and Amazon Web Services, AirTrunk and CDC, the industry body Data Centres Australia, the Business Council of Australia, Fortescue and the Northern Territory Government among them, with Google and Microsoft backing nationally consistent rules while asking for flexibility in how the energy requirements are met. One day remains, and the Territory matters on its own terms, because its government was one of the two that pushed back on the renewable energy requirement in the federal standards, recorded further down this page. The report is due on 16 November. One caution on the Darwin date. The committee's own page carries the hearing programme and refuses automated reading, so that date is taken from the page's indexed listing rather than read off the page; one report on the Canberra day described it as the inquiry's final hearing, which the listing does not support, and no venue for Darwin has surfaced. The page is the thing to open before travelling.
Two Ohio towns put the data centre question to their own voters Q9Q10
Pataskala, Licking County, and Sunbury, Delaware County, Ohio, United States
Every other American entry on this page ends with a council or a commission deciding. These two end with a count of ballots. Residents in Pataskala and in Sunbury gathered signatures for amendments to their municipal charters that would prohibit building any data centre with a peak load above 25 megawatts, which is a threshold set low enough to rule out the hyperscale facilities being built across central Ohio. Pataskala's council voted on 3 August to place the amendment on the ballot, moving its vote forward to meet the filing deadline of 5 August for the general election on 3 November. Organisers there gathered more than five hundred signatures. The council separately accepted its planning and zoning commission's recommendation to refuse a proposal from Aligned Data Centers for a 200 megawatt campus of three buildings in the city's industrial park, so the vote in November is about what happens next rather than about that application. Three more Ohio towns have since joined them, which is the change since this entry was written. Granville village council heard the first reading of an ordinance on 5 August that would put the same question to its own voters and held the public hearing and vote on it on 19 August, and reporting on the Licking County ballot counts a data centre ban among the issues certified for 3 November. Urbana's council has sent a charter amendment to the same ballot after the Champaign County Board of Elections verified the signatures; it would prohibit data centres in the city, with an exemption for a small privately owned one serving a single organisation, not in the business of processing other people's data, and drawing less than 7.5 megawatts at peak. And in Grove City the Franklin County Board of Elections has found enough valid signatures for a community consent amendment put up by residents, which would require a referendum whenever a large-scale development is proposed. Heath, Johnstown and Newark could still follow if organisers gather enough valid signatures. One thing is worth setting beside it, because it cuts the other way: a statewide constitutional amendment to prohibit data centre construction did not gather enough signatures to reach the 2026 ballot, so what is being decided in November is town by town.
The count of towns voting on data centres that day is twenty-eight, and Kansas is asking for ten years Q9Q10
Twenty-eight localities across California, Nevada, Kansas, Illinois, Ohio and Florida, United States
The Ohio entry above is not alone on that ballot, and the scale of it is the part that changed. Multistate counts 28 localities across six states voting on data centre measures on 3 November: California, Nevada, Kansas, Illinois, Ohio and Florida. Ohio is 14 of them, nine turning on electrical demand and three outright bans, in a state with at least 125 data centre moratoriums already in force. Illinois has seven, including Bloomington, whose council had already passed a six-month pause, and four Madison County cities putting advisory questions on permitting. Florida has Edgewater, where a charter amendment would ban new data centres because proponents argue a charter holds where a council ban can be undone. Kansas has the two that reach furthest: Emporia would prohibit any high-impact data centre, defined as a peak load above 10 megawatts or a draw above 100,000 gallons of water a day, which is about 380,000 litres or a sixth of an Olympic pool; El Dorado would do the same and add a ten-year moratorium that only another vote of the people could repeal or amend. A rule that can only be changed by the same body that made it is a different instrument from a council pause, and it is the longest horizon anything on this page reaches. Two of the individual measures are worth naming because they point opposite ways. In Janesville, Wisconsin, an initiative would require the approval of the voters before the city could approve development on the undeveloped parts of the former GM and JATCO site if the project costs more than 450 million dollars; behind it is a proposal from Viridian Partners for an 800 megawatt data centre campus of eleven buildings. In Boulder City, Nevada, Question 1 would make data centre facilities an approved land use in the Eldorado Valley Transfer Area, leaving out the multi-species habitat conservation easement. So one town is voting to make itself harder to build in and the other to open ground it has kept shut. The two counts do not agree and both are kept here rather than reconciled: Ballotpedia has at least five local measures across four states, which is where Janesville came from and which does not include Kansas or Illinois, and Multistate has 28 across six. Three are already decided: Monterey Park in California banned data centres outright, carried by 86 per cent of those voting in June; Augusta Township in Michigan voted in August on rezoning farmland for one; and Port Washington in Wisconsin voted to require the approval of the voters before tax incentives could go to one. One line from the Multistate piece belongs here because it cuts against the rest: recent polling suggests data centres and AI are not a big concern for many voters. This carries no door chip, on the same reading as the Ohio entry: a ballot is not a submission window, it is the decision itself.
Europe asks what is owed to the people whose work a model was trained on Open doorQ9
European Union, through the Commission's EU Survey platform
The European Commission opened this on 29 September and it runs to 3 November. It covers four things at once, and the first is the one that puts it on this page: the use of copyright-protected content in artificial intelligence. The other three are the fight against online piracy, particularly of live event broadcasts, the single equitable remuneration right of music performers and producers, and copyright in scientific research. What the responses feed is whether the existing framework should be reinforced with further measures, so this is the stage before a proposal exists rather than a comment period on a drafted text. It is the European counterpart to the Singapore consultation further up this page, which closes on 22 October and asks the same question in five parts, and the two of them are the doors here about what is owed to the people whose work went into a model rather than about where the machines are housed. Who is invited is worth reading before writing, because the list is long and does not name individuals: rights holders, generative AI providers and other actors in the AI value chain, intermediaries, collective management organisations, sports and live event organisers, research organisations, national authorities, consumer organisations and non-government organisations. A person writing on their own account is relying on being read into one of those, which is the same position the British energy call for evidence below leaves them in. The Commission describes it as a targeted consultation and it runs on the EU Survey platform.
Missoula County bought itself a year, and the study it bought comes back in November Open doorQ10
Sophie Moiese Room, 200 West Broadway, Missoula County Courthouse, Missoula, Montana, United States, and online by Teams
The county commissioners adopted interim zoning on 9 July putting a one-year stop on new or expanded data centres outside the city limits, running to 8 July 2027, on the ground of potential effects on public health and the environment. The moratorium covers the zoned and unzoned parts of the county alike and leaves the city of Missoula out, so a resident of Missoula itself is outside what is being decided. What the year is for is a study, and the county has published the timetable for it. A draft goes up on the county's own engagement site around 21 October, public meetings follow in the week after it, and the findings are then taken to two bodies: the Missoula Consolidated Land Use Board on Wednesday 4 November at 6pm, and the Board of County Commissioners on Thursday 12 November at 2pm. Both sit in the Sophie Moiese Room and both can be joined by Teams, and public comment is taken at both. The written door does not close with either of them: comments can be left on the county's engagement site throughout. The county's climate action programme manager describes the study as identifying the main areas of effect and setting out the regulatory paths open to the commissioners before the pause ends, and names decommissioning plans and bonds among the things being looked at. Decommissioning is the part worth marking, because few of the drafts on this page reach it: it asks what the building becomes, and who pays to take it away, when the machines are no longer wanted. The week of public meetings after 21 October is published as a week rather than as days, which is why the calendar above marks only the two November sittings.
Britain asks how artificial intelligence should run through its energy system Open door
United Kingdom, by email to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero
The department published a vision for an AI-enabled clean energy system on 8 September and opened a call for evidence with it, closing at 11:45pm on 6 November. It asks where artificial intelligence could change how the energy system is planned and run, what the risks are, what stands in the way of it being taken up, and what it does to the system as a whole, and what comes in is to feed a UK AI for Clean Energy Strategy. It sits on this page as the other half of the grid question the council chambers further up keep returning to: those ask what data centres draw from the grid, and this asks what the same technology is to be trusted to do inside it. Who is invited is worth reading before writing. The department names industry, academic institutions, system operators, regulators and other energy sector stakeholders, and does not name individuals, so a person writing on their own account is relying on the word other. Evidence goes by email to aiforenergy@energysecurity.gov.uk, and the 21-page vision document is published beside the call.
Woodbury County took its data centre question to three small towns in turn, and Salix is the last Open doorQ10
Salix Community Center, Woodbury County, Iowa, United States
The county board of supervisors approved a one-year moratorium on data centres in June, and the zoning commission is using that year to work out what should replace it. Rather than call one hearing at the county seat, it published three town halls in three different towns, each at 7pm: Sloan on 31 August, Moville on 21 September and Salix on 9 November. The first two have been held and no account of either has been published; the third is the one left. The commission says it is seeking input from residents on what the requirements and regulations should be, and what it is preparing is a recommendation to the supervisors on how data centre permits should be handled, which may come as a text amendment to the county zoning ordinance or as a separate ordinance. Two things make this worth reading beside the bigger entries on this page. The written door is open the whole time and does not close with any of the three meetings: comments go to Woodbury County Planning and Zoning at 620 Douglas Street, Sixth Floor, Sioux City, or by email to the planning and zoning coordinator, Dan Priestley. And the rules would reach only the unincorporated parts of the county, because the towns inside it set their own zoning, so a resident of Sloan or Moville is being asked about land that starts at the edge of their own street.
The highest decision-making meeting of the International Telecommunication Union, held every four years, where all 194 member states set what the UN's digital agency will do for the next four years and elect the people who will run it. The published agenda covers connectivity, internet governance, child online protection and the governance of emerging technologies including artificial intelligence. Three weeks of it, and the decisions run until 2030. One item on it reaches this part of the world directly. Pacific foreign ministers have supported setting up an ITU area office in the Pacific and asked that the needs of the smaller island states be taken into account; the ITU Council has already agreed to strengthen the agency's presence in the region and told the secretariat to plan it in detail, and the final decision on what that presence looks like is expected at Doha. Whether the region gets an office of its own, and what it is given to do, is settled three weeks into a conference held on the other side of the world.
Fort Worth holds two public hearings before it pauses data centres Open doorQ10
Fort Worth, Texas, United States
The council voted unanimously on 11 August to start the process for a ninety-day pause on data centre rezonings and permits, and to set up a data centre and infrastructure committee. Texas law makes a city hold two public hearings before a moratorium can be adopted, and residents may speak at both. The published timetable puts the notice on 9 October, the committee's findings before council on 3 November, the first hearing on 10 November, the second notice on 13 November, the second hearing on 5 January, a first reading on 12 January and adoption by supermajority on 16 February, with the pause ending on 17 May 2027. What staff are to study in that window is set out: noise, effects on water supply, long-term water availability, land-use compatibility and the infrastructure that comes with the buildings. Projects whose zoning applications are already in are exempt, which is the part worth reading twice.
Central Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, venue to be announced
Two days on embedding First Nations data governance and sovereignty in systems, policy and practice, run by Aventedge with the Indigenous Data Network as supporting partner. Among the reasons it gives for meeting is what emerging technology can do to cultural knowledge when it is used without safeguards, and building the ability of communities to run their own data holdings. Registration is open. Eight speakers are listed, among them Professor Marcia Langton and Professor Peter Anderson. No call for speakers or submissions is published, so what is available to an outsider here is attendance. It is on this page because of where it sits relative to the rest of it. The consent question that the UN Permanent Forum reaches in New York in May 2027 is being worked through in Melbourne in November, in the same country as the Senate inquiry, the New South Wales consultation and the South Australian royal commission, and by the people whose data governance the siting arguments elsewhere on this page keep arriving at.
Tasmania's House of Assembly got 152 submissions on AI data centres, and reports in November Q10
Tasmania, Australia, by email to the committee
The House of Assembly's Standing Committee on Government Administration A began an inquiry into AI data centres in Tasmania on 5 August, opened submissions on 18 August and closed them on Monday 21 September. The Greens proposed it; the committee is chaired by Labor's Brian Mitchell with the Greens' Tabatha Badger as deputy, and Liberal and independent members sit on it. What it has been asked to look at is written plainly: whether the state's planning system handles what these facilities do, public disclosure of the power and water they use, parliamentary oversight of how they are built and how resources are allocated to them, community consultation, what Tasmanians actually get from them, and what laws or regulations should follow. The need for that list is on the public record. Firmus Technologies has three sites in train, at St Leonards near Launceston, at Bell Bay and at Wesley Vale, with about 400 megawatts of demand across its planned stages. A kettle draws about two kilowatts, so that is roughly two hundred thousand kettles boiling at once. A document tabled in parliament in September listed six more proposals with the companies behind them kept confidential, together needing at least 500 megawatts. Submissions closed on 21 September and the committee received 152 of them, which is a large number for a state of Tasmania's size and the clearest measure on this page of how much a community will write when it is asked directly. The report is due on 16 November, which is the date this entry now carries. No hearing dates have been published, so whether any of the 152 are invited to speak is still open. This is the second parliament in Australia on this page asking about data centres, alongside the Senate's hearings further down, and the state government's own draft expectations, which close on 12 October, are a separate entry.
The UN human rights office has a call open on digital heritage Open doorQ9
Online, submissions to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
A call for input titled Digital Heritage sits on the office's calls for input listing with a closing date of 20 November. This entry is deliberately thin, and the reason is the finding. The listing page opens to an automated scan and confirms the title and the date. The call's own page does not open, as none of the individual call pages on that site do, so the questions it asks, the word limit, and who it names among those it wants to hear from could not be read here. What can be said about the subject comes from the mandate it sits with rather than from the call. The Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights reported to the Human Rights Council in 2025 on the digitalisation of cultural heritage and cultural rights, arguing for a cultural rights approach to what happens when heritage is digitised, and that is the ground a call under this title would be expected to cover. Whether it reaches Indigenous heritage, and the question of who holds and controls a community's cultural material once it exists as data, is the part this scan could not check and the part most worth checking. That question is live at this office: the Human Rights Council's own half-day panel on 23 September, recorded further up this page, was on the World Heritage Convention and Indigenous Peoples' rights. Anyone thinking of writing should open the listing, follow the call through, and read the questions and the page limit before starting.
Tākina Wellington Convention and Exhibition Centre, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand
Two days run by Te Hapori Matihiko, a community organisation for Māori working in digital technology, bringing Māori and other Indigenous technology communities together on artificial intelligence, data sovereignty, enterprise and workforce development. The speakers announced include Dr Desi Small-Rodriguez of the Northern Cheyenne Nation, who works on Indigenous data sovereignty; Ikaika Bishop, a Kanaka Maoli ocean technologist; Professor Te Taka Keegan; and Meg Smith, a Māori AI strategist. Registration is open and paid, with an early rate that ends on 21 September. No call for speakers is published, so what is open to an outsider is attendance. It falls a fortnight after Indigenous Data Our Way in Melbourne, further up this page, so the same subject is being worked through in Australia and in Aotearoa New Zealand in the same month, by the people whose data it is.
Canada asks how to build a funding stream Indigenous applicants can get through, and moved the deadline back eleven weeks Open doorQ9
Canada, by online intervention form, by post to the CRTC at Gatineau, Quebec, or as a video
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission opened this on 18 March to work out what an Indigenous stream of its Broadband Fund should look like. The reason it exists is on the record and it is the reason this belongs on this page: in earlier consultations the Commission was told that Indigenous applicants face barriers getting through its application process, and rather than treat that as a complaint it has opened a proceeding on how to remove them. That is the ninth question asked about a regulator's own front door. The changes already made to the fund give some measure of what is being built on: a requirement that applicants engage meaningfully with Indigenous communities, upfront funding to Indigenous recipients of up to 15 per cent of approved funding capped at 750,000 Canadian dollars, about A$825,000 at 1.10 Australian dollars to the Canadian dollar on 1 October 2026, and funding for up to two years of technical training for local Indigenous staff. Two things make this worth marking beside the consultations further up. How you may answer is unusually wide: the online intervention form, post, fax, or a link to a publicly accessible video, so an oral intervention counts as a submission rather than only as attendance, and First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples and organisations can ask the Commission's Indigenous Relations Team for help lodging one. And the window has been extended once already. The original notice gave 18 September for interventions and 18 December for replies; an amendment moved them to 1 December and 2 March 2027, and the reason given was to let parties take part meaningfully and build a fuller record. This is not an artificial intelligence proceeding, and the entry should not be read as one. It is about who gets funded to lay the connection, which is the layer underneath everything else on this page. One caution on sourcing: every CRTC page checked here refuses automated reading, so the dates and the participation detail come from the indexed listings and from the Commission's own news material rather than read off the notice, and the notice itself is where anyone lodging something should start.
A First Nation's challenge to the water licence behind an AI data centre goes to judicial review Q9Q10
Court of King's Bench, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation is seeking judicial review of the provincial water licence that sits under Wonder Valley, an artificial intelligence data centre project backed by Kevin O'Leary. Alberta granted the licence in April 2025 to the Municipal District of Greenview under the Water Act, and it allows the diversion of six million cubic metres of water from the Smoky River. That is six billion litres, or about 2,400 Olympic swimming pools. The Nation's case is that the province owed a duty to consult First Nations before granting it and did not consult at all. In August a Court of King's Bench judge ruled that O'Leary Digital would not be sufficiently directly affected to join as a party, and the review goes ahead in December. This is the entry on this page where the site's two questions are one question in one room: whether the people whose Country that water runs through were asked, and whether a river's draw-down is a thing the court will weigh. The month is published and the day is not, which is why this entry carries no marked day on the calendar above; the court's own listing is where the date will appear.
The Fairfax hearing that gave residents their way in has been put back to December Open doorQ10
Board Auditorium, Fairfax County Government Center, 12000 Government Center Parkway, Fairfax, Virginia, United States, and online
Starwood Capital Group has filed permits and building plans for a data centre on a thirty-four acre site at 6299 Edsall Road at Lincolnia, on the edge of Alexandria. Dominion Energy needs a substation and new transmission lines to power it and to reach the existing Van Dorn substation, and it is the substation, not the data centre, that comes to the planning commission. The hearing is a public facilities review under section 15.2-2232 of Virginia code, which asks whether a proposed public facility fits the county's adopted plan. It was set for 7pm on 24 September. It now sits at 7:30pm on 2 December before the planning commission, because Dominion Energy asked for it to be deferred, saying it needs the time to lodge further material on the substation. That is worth holding onto as its own fact: the applicant asked for more time and got ten weeks, in a process where the objectors had a fixed date to speak to. The Mason District Land Use Committee made its recommendation on 22 September, and no account of it has been published. What makes this worth marking is the shape of it rather than the size. The data centre itself is a by-right use and does not need this hearing; the substation does, so the substation review is where the proposal comes up for public comment at all, and a good deal of weight has landed on it. The Mason District supervisor has asked the planning commission to reject the application, Representative Don Beyer has called on the county to deny it, more than 1,300 people signed a letter to the Governor opposing it, and a community forum at Beatley Library in Alexandria was packed. Alexandria is a different jurisdiction from the one deciding, which is the other thing to notice: the objections loudest here come from people whose council does not get a vote.
EU AI Act, the grace period ends and two prohibitions begin
European Union, all member states
Two things land on this date. Generative AI systems that were already on the market before 2 August 2026 were given until now to carry machine-readable marking on what they produce, so the transition period for labelling synthetic content runs out. And two practices become prohibited outright under article 5: AI systems designed to generate intimate images of a person without their consent, and AI systems that generate child sexual abuse material. Both prohibitions were added by the Digital Omnibus on AI, which entered into force on 27 July 2026 and moved most of the high-risk obligations to December 2027.
Held as a hybrid meeting, so it can be joined without travelling, under the theme "Governing the Internet in the Age of Intelligence: Our Shared Responsibility". The calls to shape the programme have closed: session proposals, IGF Village booths and remote hub applications all shut on 31 July at 23:59 UTC. A remote hub is a local gathering that watches the sessions together and sends interventions in, which was the way in for anyone who could not travel, and that window is now shut. What is left is to register and attend remotely.
Europe asks what every data centre on the continent should have to meet Open doorQ10
European Union, through the Commission's consultation portal
The European Commission opened a twelve-week public consultation and call for evidence on 21 September on minimum performance standards for data centres in the European Union, and it closes on 14 December. What is being asked about is a floor that every new or retrofitted data centre would have to clear: energy efficiency, water use, reuse of waste heat, services back to the grid, and other sustainability criteria, with standards for existing facilities in scope as well. Responses feed the Commission's preparatory work for a legislative proposal planned for the second quarter of 2027, so this is the stage before the text exists. It sits alongside a regulation the Commission has already adopted setting up a rating scheme and label for data centres across the Union, with the first labels expected during 2027 and a first review of the scheme by the end of 2028. Two things make this the widest door on the page. Nearly every other entry here is one council, one county or one state deciding what to ask of one building; this asks what the floor should be in twenty-seven countries at once, and it asks before the law is drafted rather than after. And waste heat is on the list, which almost none of the local drafts reach. A data centre turns nearly all the electricity it draws into heat, and the question underneath that item is whether the heat goes into the air above the building or into somebody's hot water and radiators.
South Africa is to reopen its national AI policy for comment, after withdrawing the first draft Open doorQ9
South Africa, written comment
The Department of Communications and Digital Technologies published a draft national artificial intelligence policy on 10 April 2026 and gave the public sixty days to comment on it. The draft was withdrawn on 12 June, because it cited sources that do not exist; the reporting puts that down to AI having been used in writing it without the citations being checked. The department said in May that a revised policy would go to Cabinet by November and that public comment would be invited from January 2027. That is why this is on the page with a month and no day: the month comes from the department's own statement, no notice has been published, and until one is there is nothing to write into. It is worth holding the whole sequence together rather than only the ending. A government put out a policy on artificial intelligence that artificial intelligence had partly invented, the public comment window ran over a document that could not be relied on, and the correction is a second window nine months later. Whether it opens in January is the first checkable thing; whether the sixty days come back with it is the second.
Brunei hosts the digital ministers of the ten member states and their dialogue partners. The sixth meeting adopted an expanded ASEAN framework on AI governance and ethics covering generative AI, and set work going on a regional AI safety network, so this is where that work is next reported on. The host and the month are published; the days are not yet, which is why this entry has no marked day on the calendar above.
Colorado Springs rationed the microphone, then postponed the decision until after its own election Open doorQ9Q10
Colorado Springs, Colorado, United States
On 17 September the city council sat at the Pikes Peak Center to decide two appeals against Project Taurus, an artificial intelligence data centre proposed on the site of a former Intel plant near Garden of the Gods Road, drawing up to 50 megawatts and 200,000 gallons of water a day. That is about 760,000 litres, or roughly a third of an Olympic pool, daily. It did not decide. The council voted seven to two to put the appeals off to its meeting on 13 April 2027, which falls after the city's April election. Councillor Roland Rainey moved the delay and gave two reasons: negotiations with Colorado Springs Utilities over a large load tariff contract are unfinished, and city staff need time to write rules for data centres generally. Councillors Kimberly Gold and Nancy Henjum voted against. What that did to the asking is the reason this sits on the forward page rather than only in the record. Public comment on the day was capped at 120 speakers, two minutes each, no ceding of time and no multimedia, and 148 people had signed up: 126 against and 22 in support. So twenty-eight people who put their names down did not get to speak, at a sitting that then decided nothing, and reporting describes a raucous meeting with three people taken into custody. The seven months now run in favour of whoever can wait. What to watch for between now and April is the utilities tariff contract and the general data centre rules, because both are being settled in the gap, and neither has a published date.
Second session of the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance
New York, United States
The Global Dialogue was set up by the General Assembly as a yearly meeting on how AI is governed, open to all member states and to stakeholders including civil society. Its first session was held in Geneva on 6 and 7 July 2026. The second is set for New York, alongside the Multistakeholder Forum on Science, Technology and Innovation for the Global Goals. The submission portal that fed the first session has closed, and how anyone registers or contributes to the second has not been published; the secretariat says it will go on the Dialogue's own site, which makes that page the one to keep checking. Support for travel to the Dialogue is handled through the Digital Cooperation Fund and is described as open on a rolling basis.
26th session of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues Q9
New York, United States
Meeting under the theme of twenty years of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, at the forum where the siting of data centres has been raised as a question of consent.
The next state-level summit in the series that ran at Bletchley Park, Seoul, Paris and New Delhi. Swiss President Guy Parmelin announced the host city in New Delhi in February 2026; the dates have since been published, which is why this is on the page now and was held off before. It is run by the Federal Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications with the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, and is to draw from governments, academia, the private sector and civil society, though the organisers say capacity at the core venue is limited and places will be allocated. Three ways in are named without dates: a Road to Geneva strand of pre-events, submitted through an online form, opening in late summer 2026; a Call for Issues gathering stakeholder perspectives, launching in autumn 2026; and a call for side event proposals in early 2027. Those are the doors to watch for, and the summit's own site is where they are to be announced.
The International Telecommunication Union's yearly summit, at the same venue and in the same week as the state-level Geneva summit, which the Swiss organisers say runs back to back with it. The two published date ranges overlap: the ITU gives the week as 21 to 25 June, and the Swiss site gives 21 and 22 June for its own two days, so which days belong to which meeting is not settled in what either has published. No dated call for papers, sessions or speakers has been posted for 2027; the ITU points people to its engagement page.
20th session of the UN Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Q9
Palais des Nations, Geneva, Switzerland
The Expert Mechanism meets for five days, and its twentieth session falls in the year the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples turns twenty, with a stocktaking report to the Human Rights Council attached to that anniversary. It is on this page well ahead of its date for one reason. The Mechanism's annual studies are built from a public call for submissions, open to states, Indigenous Peoples' organisations, national human rights institutions, academics and others, and those calls have run with deadlines early in the year. The call feeding the 2027 session has not been published. When it is, it is the shape of door this page exists to mark. The subject is already live there: the nineteenth session, in July 2026, took up artificial intelligence alongside Indigenous Peoples' rights in conflict situations, which is the same question the council chambers further up this page keep arriving at from the other end. One caution. The Mechanism's own pages at ohchr.org refuse automated reading, so the dates here come from a second listing rather than from the source page; that page is still where the call and the registration will appear, and it is worth opening directly.
Seventy-five entries, forty-six of them doors, two added, five sharpened and two moved into the record.
Two entries had 1 October as their date and both have moved to what already came, and they went opposite ways. South Australia's royal commission into artificial intelligence started on the day and filled in what was missing: three commissioners were named, Dr Iain Ross AO as chair with Kate Pounder and Professor Christopher Manning, and the terms of reference were published with them. They reach further than the August announcement suggested. The commissioners are directed to have regard to data sovereignty and the state's strategic autonomy over AI systems, data and critical capabilities, and to the views of community representatives alongside business, unions, developers, academia and the creative industries. What is still not published is the door: reporting says public call-outs for formal submissions follow shortly after the launch, and none has appeared, so there is nothing yet for a person to write into. When one opens it comes back onto this page as its own entry. The data centre exclusion the Premier set out in August stands. Baltimore County went the other way. Its planning board had until 1 October to get its data centre study to the council, the board voted on the report on 17 September, and no confirmation that it landed has surfaced; the county's own study page refused automated reading for this scan, returning a forbidden response rather than a page, so that page is the thing to open. What is on the record is the recommendation reported from the September hearing, which is the restrictive one: data centres barred from agricultural and residential zones and allowed sparingly in office and commercial zones. The watch has logged neither.
Two were added, one of them a door that reaches a long way. UNESCO has a global consultation open until 15 October on who governs the AI tools arriving in classrooms. What is out for comment is a discussion paper and six background papers, and the question it puts is what it takes for an education system to exercise agency in the face of rapid AI diffusion and keep education's public purpose. One of the six papers is on digital and AI sovereignty, which is this site's own subject reached from the schoolroom end rather than the substation. Two of the others ask what almost nothing else on this page asks: who chose the tool, under AI procurement, and what the whole bill comes to once licences, devices and staff time are counted. Comments go by email and the invitation names experts, academics, government officials and other stakeholders, so a person writing on their own account is relying on the word other. The second addition is a room. Oakland's council votes on 6 October on a 45-day stop that reaches the operation of data centres as well as their approval, which is wider than most of the pauses here, and the arithmetic is the thing to watch: as an urgency measure it needs seven votes where five would ordinarily carry, so a measure that cleared its committee without a dissenting voice can still fail by two. Residents who spoke at that committee did not talk about zoning. One told it she and her daughters live with asthma, that they are tired of living with pollution, and asked the city to study what contaminants would be released before it approves anything.
Five already here were sharpened. Australia's national AI standards consultation now has a paper rather than a promise of one: Getting it right: Building AI infrastructure that works for Australia, in three parts, with submissions closing at 5pm on Friday 9 October through a named online form. It also asks something the first reporting did not show, how Australian creatives and copyright holders can be supported under the conditions for AI training, which is the question Singapore and the European Commission are asking separately on this page. The Senate inquiry has been re-anchored to Darwin on 3 November, its one remaining hearing day, with Canberra held on 1 October; what is lodged in writing there is substantial and public, from Microsoft, Google and Amazon Web Services, AirTrunk and CDC, the Business Council, Fortescue and the Northern Territory Government, and councils told the committee that data centres are outpacing their planning controls and arriving on prime land. Cleveland's final evening on 7 October takes sign-ups for speaking slots from 5:30pm, half an hour before it starts, and the building behind the argument now has a name: Lakeland Equity Group's proposed hyperscale facility on East 55th Street. Charlotte's possible extension has a date rather than only a length, holding the pause through 11 October 2027, which is closer to eleven months than the nine earlier reporting gave, so the date is what to read. And Denton's first hearing on 22 September produced a count: twenty people spoke and all twenty backed the ninety-day pause.
Three entries whose first date has passed were re-anchored to the date still ahead rather than moved, because each has one left. Spokane County heard the pause in September and hears the zoning code meant to replace it on 15 October. Woodbury County has taken its question to Sloan and Moville and has Salix on 9 November. Fairfax County's substation hearing, deferred at the applicant's request, now sits on 2 December.
Leads checked and dropped, and three of them are the same error caught three times. Searching turned up three European Commission consultations on artificial intelligence presented as open: the AI regulatory sandboxes, the protocols for reserving rights from text and data mining, and the draft guidelines classifying high-risk AI systems. Opening each one showed closing dates of 13 January, 23 January and 23 July 2026. The draft guidelines on AI transparency obligations closed on 3 June. None would have been caught without opening the source page, which is now five times this class of error has been stopped at the same step. Kenya's draft AI policy consultation closed on 4 August and is a separate thing from the data centre licence consultation that is on this page. Ireland's pre-legislative scrutiny of its AI Bill closed on 13 April. India's consultation closed in early 2025 and its guidelines were issued in November that year. McCormick County in South Carolina has a second reading on data centre rules with no published date. Leominster in Massachusetts passed its moratoriums on 28 September, to 31 July 2027, so there is nothing ahead of it to mark. Nothing was dropped under the defence rule.
One thing did not change and it is the same one as the last two runs. The Pacific Digital and Artificial Intelligence Technology Principles, endorsed by Forum Leaders at Koror in September, are to be tested and adapted into a Pacific AI Governance Framework for Leaders to consider in 2027. No month has been published for it, and no 2027 Forum ICT Ministers Meeting date has surfaced either, though that meeting is now the Forum's standing platform for digital policy and met in Port Moresby on 24 July. A year is not a date, so both stay off this page. They remain the first thing to check on the next run.
What is closing or sitting within the fortnight. Today, 2 October, New Brunswick's consultation closes. On 5 October Beaufort County votes on a one-year pause it already put back a month so residents could be heard. On 6 October six things sit at once: Lexington sets aside a whole council sitting for residents, Raleigh allows thirty minutes in total, Oakland needs seven votes, Mendocino County decides whether to turn forty-five days into two years, Monticello hears three applications for a three million square foot campus, and the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence sits in Sydney. On 7 October Northern Ireland's draft AI strategy closes, Smithfield hears its appeal, and Cleveland holds the last of its three evenings. On 8 October Kenya's data centre licence consultation closes and Nye County hears its 46-page bill in two chambers at once. On 9 October Australia's AI infrastructure consultation closes at 5pm and the Human Rights Council rises. On 10 October the Escondido and Palm Springs pauses lapse. On 12 October Tasmania's draft expectations close and Charlotte holds the hearing on extending its pause. On 13 October there is a free hour on Indigenous data sovereignty run from Queensland, the United States closes its consultation on rebuilding its vulnerability database, and Sioux County takes its second reading. On 14 October Adair County hears its ordinance. On 15 October Spokane County's planning commission hears the zoning code meant to replace its pause and UNESCO's education consultation closes. The day the fortnight ends carries three more: Brazil's call for its regulatory agenda closes, and the Cleveland and Mendocino pauses both run out.
Entries move to what already came once the date passes. They are kept there with a note of what came of it where the watch logged an outcome, so an announcement can be checked against what actually happened. Every entry is also held one per line in a machine-readable file.
GAJRA Earth