AI is changing the system. Here are 500 ways we can change it back.
500 Ways You Can Change the System is FairByDesign’s public research and technology-building initiative for people and organizations that do not want to stand helplessly outside the systems shaping their future. It shows practical ways to participate in, question, test, improve, and help govern automated systems, instead of standing outside them.
The problem
Organizations can keep collecting money, issuing notices, making decisions, and imposing consequences while the people able to explain, correct, or take responsibility become harder and harder to reach. That is not a reason to reject AI. It is a reason to make sure people keep a real hand in how it is used.
Available now — the FairByDesign App Hub
Seven tools are live and publicly usable today at app.fairbydesign.org. They are free, ask for no account, and keep your answers only long enough to produce your result.
- AI or Workflow? Decision Tool — is AI even the right call for this problem?
- Use-Case Value Scorer — value and risk, scored separately, so one never hides the other.
- Governance Stopgate — a deterministic go / go-with-conditions / hold / stop review.
- AI Readiness Brief Generator — a one-page brief you can bring to an actual decision meeting.
- Human Escalation Auditor — was a real person actually reachable, authorized, and able to fix it?
- Support-Loop Failure Analyzer — diagnoses exactly where a chatbot, form, or email loop failed you.
- Automation Harm Evidence Builder — turns a messy timeline into a structured, dated evidence record.
In development
Three more tools — an AI Decision Challenge Builder, a Human Oversight Audit, and an AI Accountability Scorecard — are specified and next in line, built after the current seven are stable and connected.
Planned
Eighteen further tools are specified across software recoverability, migration planning, privacy configuration, ethical automation templates, evidence documentation, independent AI evaluation, community data stewardship, governance training, verified research, local AI deployment, and public-interest accountability infrastructure. None of these exist yet — they are planned, not built.
How this connects
Every public tool started as a pattern our research kept finding in real investigations — a support loop with no way out, a decision nobody could explain, evidence nobody had structured. The Mercury Brief carries those investigations, and the tools are how the findings become something you can actually use.