About MAC

The Maine AI Coalition is a nonprofit organization in formation. Our mission is to reduce the burdens and maximize the benefits of AI for the citizens of Maine, with particular attention to the Mainers most easily left behind: rural communities and lower incomes.

What We Do

AI is changing Maine — its economy, its institutions, its everyday life. National information resources can’t tell Mainers what’s specifically relevant to them. We fill that gap.

We build and support AI Communities of Practice (CoPs): sector-specific groups where Mainers learn about AI from each other, sharing what works, what doesn’t, and what matters for their field. We provide the infrastructure — online discussion, participation by email, meeting support, and a shared resource library — so that community leaders can focus on building community, not managing logistics.

We also support other Maine AI initiatives by:

• acting as a “switching point” for people to find resources and help,
• supporting CoPs associated with these initiatives.

How We Work

Five principles underpin everything MAC does. They are not goals we’re working toward — they are preconditions for the work itself.

Human-centric by design and practice. AI is the subject matter; the communities are for people. Every decision about infrastructure, norms, and governance is evaluated first by its effect on the humans it serves. When AI tools are used in MAC spaces, they are identified as such. MAC communities are designed so members know they’re talking to real neighbors: we require real names, strongly promote in-person meetings, and require Maine residency (with human-reviewed exceptions). These aren’t bureaucratic rules — they’re how you build the kind of trust that makes honest questions possible.

Open to all. MAC communities are open to anyone who wants to participate, regardless of technical background, income, education, or geography. We design for the person in rural Washington County with no AI experience, not just for the Portland tech professional who already has a head start.

Trust. MAC builds an environment where members — across all communities, all sectors, and all backgrounds — feel safe to learn, question, and disagree. Partisanship is the most direct threat to this. A room that divides into camps stops learning. MAC’s nonpartisan standard is not a political preference — it’s a precondition for our mission.

Community. A mailing list of isolated individuals is not a community. We focus on building genuine relationships — people who know each other’s names, who reach out between events, who recruit each other — that make learning self-sustaining and resilient to the departure of any individual, including our founders.

Transparency, with a right of withdrawal. Communications through MAC infrastructure should be treated as potentially public — members participate as themselves, accountably, with their neighbors. Balancing this, every member has the right to withdraw something they said: to have it struck from the record, removed from MAC’s live archives, and no longer quoted or cited against them in MAC spaces. This isn’t a pretense that words were never said — it’s a community commitment that withdrawn words no longer count against the person who said them.

MAC and Its Communities

MAC is rigorously neutral — we hold no positions on AI policy, vendor choices, or contested questions. That neutrality is what makes us useful to all sectors.

The communities we provide infrastructure to are different. The sector-specific groups MAC hosts may reach their own conclusions, advocate for particular approaches, and speak in their own voice. When a community takes a position, that is the community speaking — not MAC. MAC provides the infrastructure and the standards (civil, nonpartisan, noncommercial); what communities build within those standards belongs to them.

This distinction matters: a neutral convener that silenced its communities would produce nothing worth convening for.

Who We Are

MAC is in formation. Our founding team:

Fletcher Kittredge has spent more than three decades building internet and technology infrastructure in Maine. He brings a practitioner’s understanding of what it takes to build technology that serves communities outside the urban core — and a long-standing belief that infrastructure decisions shape who gets left behind.

Tom Law is a Maine technology entrepreneur and community builder with deep roots in Maine’s startup, nonprofit, and civic technology communities.

We are recruiting a founding board. If you are interested in serving, contact us.

History

The Maine AI Consortium — a community of Maine AI practitioners — has been building peer learning networks in the Maine tech community for several years. MAC grows out of that work: it provides the organizational infrastructure to support and expand what the Consortium started, and to extend the model to additional sectors beyond tech.

MAC is currently forming as a Maine nonprofit and seeking 501(c)(3) status.

Funding

MAC’s formation is supported by a pledge from a Maine family foundation, contingent on achieving 501(c)(3) status. We will seek broader philanthropic and institutional support as the organization grows. We do not accept funding from AI vendors or companies with a commercial interest in our communities’ decisions.