Data for Children Collaborative, part of the Edinburgh Futures Institute, won the Best Ethical Data Initiative category at the 2024 DataIQ Awards. Alex Hutchison, its Director and Founder, received the award in the Data and AI for Good stream at the ceremony in London this September. 

At the Data for Children Collaborative, we have been continuously developing and refining our Responsible Innovation framework to support challenge-led, multi-sectoral collaborative data projects that aim to improve children's lives. The framework is a suite of tools and approaches that are used across end-to-end data project delivery, surfacing and mitigating socio-ethical, legal, and regulatory considerations.  

The framework prioritizes ethics in all aspects of our work through a suite of tools and methods that ensure representative and meaningful participation, and reflective discussions about projects' impact on communities implicated, ethical considerations arising from data methods and analysis, and communications of the outputs.

Our approach generates trust in the research insights, offering long lasting societal impacts, by ensuring they are created in an ethically robust environment. Its value doesn’t end there – the teams take the Responsible Innovation skills and tools with them to their wider work, from being more aware of the ethical implications of their decision making to championing safe data practices.  

The Data for Children Collaborative prioritise ethics at every step of their work. Our foundations for each project are set through a series of structured workshops and ethics journalling, facilitated by our team. This ensures ethical deliberation across a series of crafted questions on people, data, and communications through an online platform. Beyond that we have ethics as a standing item in our monthly sprint meetings with collaborative teams, to understand if any new ethical risks or issues have arisen and need to be considered and addressed. 

Beyond our day-to-day role in championing the highest ethical standards across our portfolio of Data for Good projects, the Data for Children Collaborative also actively promotes the implementation of applied ethics through keynote presentations, panels and via our social media and website communications. We also recently designed a bespoke workbook to support international organisations with ‘Designing Ethical Youth Participation’ for the purpose of running youth assemblies on the topic of getting a social license from young people for the re-use of public sector data.  

Read more about the DataIQ Awards: 2024 DataIQ Awards - Best Ethical Data Initiative: Edinburgh Futures Institute 

More about the Responsible Innovation framework: https://www.dataforchildrencollaborative.com/responsible-innovation-glance

Finalists: 

Edinburgh Futures Institute Putting the “Responsible” in “Responsible Innovation”

International Workplace One Learner, One Record: Putting learners in control of their data

London Borough of Camden Camden Data Charter

Times Higher Education (THE) The Times Higher Education Sub-Saharan Africa University Rankings: Supporting the growth of higher education in Africa 

Trilateral Research Ethics-by-design: Revolutionising responsible AI

Zurich Insurance Pioneering Responsible AI: Penny’s ethical data journey