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Systemic Data Ethics

Systemic Data Ethics is an ongoing project to establish a whole system, meta framework for ethical decision making and engineering in big data and AI.

Find out more at SystemicDataEthics.org

 

Core Skills

As we’ve worked with decentralisation and innovation in practice over the years, we’ve come to realise that most of us are missing the core skills required to operate in a less centralised world.

Developing an awareness of the dynamics of team interactions in a meeting, will reveal some of the fundamental challenges to high performance. Not only is it easy to do, it’s also a quick way to find out what is going on and what is causing the problems. More info at Dynamic Team Diagnostic

For more in-depth training, LisaFarron.com

 
 

Close collaborations

We work with Signify, an ethical data science company, as technical and cultural engineers. Since 2017, we have designed and built a platform to perform social media analysis, developing data insights for the Brexit remain campaign and architecting processes for monitoring online racism.

We have simultaneously provided ongoing cultural cultivation, assisting the team to deepen inter-personal trust, provide more honest feedback and decentralise their decision making.

LiveWyer was one of the first Kubernetes certified consultancies in the UK offering deep technical services implementing and managing containerised servers. We have worked with LiveWyer to establish a more systemic vision of the future, identifying new growth strategies and directions of potential travel. At the same time we’ve worked with the development team to establish protocols for software specification and project coordination.

Our work with LiveWyer has also included developing detailed network maps of team roles and inter-dependencies, informing a more dynamic role structure, and facilitating regular retrospectives to build team trust.

KendraIo is an open source project seeking to empower individuals to access and harness their own personal data. We work with the project to architect the underlying technical tools and evolve the developer and user experience.

We’re also working to establish new team rituals, engaging emotions and humanity to foster a collaboration culture that empowers humans and guides the team to find the right kind of solutions to socio-technical challenges.

Example Projects

Multinational Data Ethics Principles

A major, international credit card company asked us to facilitate the development of their core data ethics principles. The company had been struggling to advance the project and internal differences were preventing real action. Innovative projects were being abandoned after significant amounts of investment as ethical issues were only surfaced too late in the project.

Executives from around the world flew in for a two day workshop. We guided the group through a process of envisioning there future, understanding the human factors, and bringing awareness to the need for clarity and collaboration. On the second day we pulled the ideas together and established a new ethical vision.

Our work extended beyond the workshop and provided a set of ongoing tools. We created a set of “flash cards” with 22 Questions on Data Ethics to support ongoing conversations.

We combined our understanding of the technology with counselling and facilitation to steer discussions towards practical implementable objectives. A lot of post-it notes were involved.

Measuring Data Ethics Culture

Our ongoing work in Data Ethics led to the creation of the Systemic Data Ethics framework. We used this framework to create a measurement tool that would allow us to get a big picture view of a data ethics culture for a multinational media brand.

Our Navigator survey tool allowed us to poll participants from across the organization and generate a system map, highlighting the perception of strengths and weaknesses in data culture. The underlying systemic nature of this tool made it possible to highlight aspects of the system that were not operating effectively.

 

Working on European research and community project, Commensi, we designed and implemented an open source community mapping toolkit and geoJSON based inter-operability specification. The editing interface is built using Coda.io. More recently we implemented the tools to support a Zero Waste Atlas in Lisbon.

Internet of Things architecture

We’re designing a protocol specification and implementing the orchestration logic and interfaces for an IOT based game in China. We’ve designed a decentralized system using MQTT, and node-red to allow different levels of the system to be built and managed independently, without one layer requiring any detailed knowledge of the other. With careful standard definition, we’re working to ensure that the ongoing costs to maintain and evolve the system are minimised. Sorry, can’t tell you much more about it.

We worked with the Child Rights Information Network to reframe how they worked with technology. We trained their team in “first principles”, enabling them to effectively define problem statements, understand how to communicate requirements and then navigate the decision making process. Our success was essentially enabling them to leave behind legacy technology and become far more lean.

More on our blog

You can find more about our work at ideas.the-organization.com