Ethics is the expression of values in actual behaviour. So when you want to do data ethics it is about practical issues, and reconsidering entrenched routines. In the past few weeks I successfully challenged some routine steps in a clients’ organisation, resulting in better and more ethical use of data. The provision of subsidies to individuals is arranged by specific regulations. The regulations describe the conditions and limitations for getting a subsidy, and specify a set of requirements when you apply for a subsidy grant. Such subsidy regulations, once agreed have legal status.
With the client we’re experimenting in making it vastly less of an effort for both requester and the client to process a request. As only then does it make sense to provide smaller sized subsidies to individual citizens. Currently there is a rather high lower limit for subsidies. Otherwise the costs of processing a request would be higher than the sum involved, and the administrative demands for the requester would be too big in comparison to the benefits received. Such a situation typically leads to low uptake of the available funding, and ineffective spending, which both make the intended impact lower (in this case reducing energy usage and CO2 emissions).
In a regular situation the drafting of regulation and then the later creation of an application form would be fully separate steps, and the form would probably blindly do what the regulations implies or demands and also introduce some overshoot out of caution.
Our approach was different. I took the regulation and lifted out all criteria that would require some sort of test, or demands that need a piece of information or data. Next, for each of those criteria and demands I marked what data would satisfy them, the different ways that data could be collected, and what role it played in the process. The final step is listing the fields needed in the form and/or those suggested by the form designers, and determining how filling those fields can be made easier for an applicant, (E.g. having pick up lists)
A representation of the steps taken / overview drawn
What this drawing of connections allows is to ask questions about the need and desirability of collecting a specific piece of data. It also allows to see what it means to change a field in a form, for how well the form complies with the regulation, or which fields and what data flows need to change when you change the regulation.
Allowing these questions to be asked, led to the realisation that several hard demands for information in the draft regulation actually play no role in determining eligibility for the subsidy involved (it was simply a holdover from another regulation that was used as template, and something that the drafters thought was ’nice to have’). As we were involved early, we could still influence the draft regulation and those original unneeded hard demands were removed just before the regulation came up for an approval vote. Now that we are designing the form it also allows us to ask whether a field is really needed, where the organisation is being overcautious about an unlikely scenario of abuse, or where it does not match an actual requirement in the regulation.
Questioning the need for specific data, showing how it would complicate the clients’ work because collecting it comes with added responsibilities, and being able to ask those questions before regulation was set in stone, allowed us to end up with a more responsible approach that simultaneously reduced the administrative hoops for both applicant and client to jump through. The more ethical approach now is also the more efficient and effective one. But only because we were there at the start. Had we asked those questions after the regulation was set, it would have increased the costs of doing the ethically better thing.
The tangible steps taken are small, but with real impact, even if that impact would likely only become manifest if we hadn’t taken those steps. Things that have less friction get noticed less. Baby steps for data ethics, therefore, but I call it a win.
Ton, see also twitter @StevenvtVeld
My remark on this text is you are describing availability and use of data as a basis to introduce data ethics. What I am missing is the data itself, even more if data is in fact information. You’ll see the notion of ethics becomes much stronger if you would create a conceptual basis to define the data itself, and you will get to a much stronger basis to get to ethics.
Wat bedoel je met ‘je vergeet de data / info zelf’? Ik heb het voorbeeld misschien te veel uitgekleed en geabstraheerd, maar ik wilde vooral het punt maken dat je informatiekundig naar ’n Regeling in wording moet kijken. Als je pas naar je informatiekundig ontwerp gaat kijken nadat een Regeling van kracht is geworden, ben je te laat en móet je die tekst als uitgangspunt nemen. Neemt niet weg dat we ook kijken naar wat er uiteindelijk verzameld wordt, hoe en waarom, of dat allemaal niet anders kan, en welke aspecten rond bewaren, automatische afwegingen, en bijvoorbeeld minimalisatie van wat je een aanvrager wilt laten invullen. Maar als in een Regeling harde eisen staan voor het aanleveren van documenten die geen rol spelen in de besluitvorming op een aanvraag in het kader van die Regeling, dan ben je al te laat. Het gaat me dus om het pleidooi dat je het schrijven van een Regeling hand in hand moet laten gaan met het testen van en reflecteren op hoe zich dat in dataverzameling en gebruik vertaalt. Vooral omdat de praktijk bij het opstellen van een regeling is een vorige regeling als sjabloon te hanteren, zonder reflectie op nut en noodzaak van geformuleerde eisen. En dito aan de kant van de aanvraagprocedure waar het ‘natuurlijk nodig is’ sommige dingen te bevragen, zonder daar bij elke toepassing opnieuw expliciete onderbouwing bij te vereisen.
Today 17 years ago, at 14:07, I published my first blog post, and some 2000 followed since then. Previously I kept a website that archive.org traces back to early 1998, which was the second incarnation of a static website from 1997 (Demon Internet, my first ISP other than my university, entered the Dutch market in November 1996, and I became their customer at the earliest opportunity. From the start they gave their customers a fixed IP address, allowing me to run my own server, next to the virtual server space they provided with a whopping 5MB of storage .) Maintaining a web presence for over 22 years is I think the longest continuous thing I’ve done during my life.
Last year I suggested to myself on my 16th bloggiversary to use this date yearly to reflect:
In the past 12 months I’ve certainly started to evangelise technology more again. ‘Again’ as I did that in the ’00s as well when I was promoting the use of social software (before it’s transformation into, todays mostly toxic, social media), for informal learning networks, knowledge management and professional development. My manifesto on Networked Agency from 2016, as presented at last year’s State of the Net, is the basis for that renewed effort. It’s not a promotion of tech for tech’s sake, as networked agency comes part and parcel with ethics by design, a perception of digital transformation as distributed digital transformation, and attention in general for how our digital tools are a reflection and extension of our human networks and human nature (when ‘smaller‘ and optionally networked for richer results).
Looking back 12 months I think I’ve succeeded in doing a few things on the level of my own behaviour, my company, my clients, and general communities and society. It’s all early beginnings, but a consistent effort of small things builds up over time steadily I suppose.
On a personal level I kept up the pace of my return to more intensive blogging two years ago, and did more to make my blog not only the nexus but also the starting point for most of my online material. (E.g. I now mostly send out Tweets and Toots from my blog directly). I also am slowly re-adopting and rebuilding my information strategies of old. More importantly I’m practicing more show and tell, of how I work with information. At the Crafting {a} Life unconference that Peter organised on Prince Edward Island in June I participated in three conversations on blogging that way. Peter’s obligation to explain is good guidance in general here.
For my company it means we’ve embarked on a path to more information security awareness, starting with information hygiene mostly. This includes avoiding silos where possible, and beginning the move to a self-hosted Slack-like environment and our own cloud. This is a reflection of my own path in this field since the spring of 2014, then inspired by Brenno de Winter and Arjen Kamphuis, whose disappearance a year ago made me more strongly realise the importance of paying lessons learned forward.
With clients I’ve put the ethics of working with data front and center, which includes earlier topics like privacy law, data sovereignty and procurement, but also builds on my company’s principle of always ensuring the involvement of all external stakeholders when it comes to figuring out the use and value of open government and open data. Some of that is awareness raising, some of that is ensuring small practical steps are taken. Our company is now building up a ‘holistic’ data governance program for clients that includes all this, not just the technical side of data governance.
On the community side several things I got myself involved in are tied to this.
As a board member of Open Nederland I help spread the word about how to allow others to make use of your work with Creative Commons licenses, such as at the recent Open Access Week organised by the Leeuwarden library. Agency and making, and especially the joy of finding (networked) agency through making, made possible by considered sharing, was also my message at the CoderDojo Conference Netherlands last weekend.
Here in the Netherlands I co-hosted two IndieWebCamps in Utrecht in April, and in Amsterdam in September (triggered by a visit to an IndieWebCamp in Germany a year ago). With my co-organiser Frank we’ve also launched a Meet-up around IndieWeb in the hope of more continuously engaging a more local group of participants.
I’ve also contributed to the Copenhagen 150 this year at Techfestival, which resulted in the TechPledge. Specifically I worked to get some version of being responsible for creating ongoing public debate around any tech you create in there, to make reflection integral to tech development. I took the TechPledge, and I ask you to do the same.
Another take-away from my participation in the Copenhagen 150, is to treat my involvement in the use and development of technology more deliberately as a political act in its own right. This allows me to feel a deeper connection I think between tech as extension of human reach and global topics that require a sense of urgency of humanity.
Here’s to another year of blogging, and, more importantly, reading your blog!