A different type of collaborative working – Pulling together report content from a range of contributors
By Alex Hutchison, Director, Data for Children Collaborative
When offered the opportunity to work on an expert group report on Building Trust in the Digital Era, commissioned by the Scottish Government, our team leapt at the chance. Ethics is such a central part to our thinking at the Data for Children Collaborative that the idea that we could support work aimed at influencing change in this area really chimed with our broader goal of being ethical activists.
A huge amount of work had already been delivered with and on behalf of an expert group assembled from a variety of institutions, sectors and disciplines. A mini-public consultation exercise had been run with some hugely insightful output from a representative sample of citizens from across Scotland. Expert interviews had been held and written up as well as case studies from some of the expert groups and beyond. Additionally, an ‘Objects of Trust’ framework to apply to all digital innovation had also been positioned throughout all of this content. What was left for the Data for Children Collaborative to do, then? I hear you ask. It turns out - quite a lot!
Our role was to synthesise all of this valuable information that had been provided and write a report that met an audience of ministers, policymakers, businesses, civil society and the people of Scotland. We needed to identify themes, logically piece together content that flowed sensibly and ensure that there was a balance to the content that was being positioned. This was a critical part of our responsibility - bringing together the positive and negative concepts around innovation and ethics. Identification of the ethical risks and challenges with innovation is, dare I say it, easy. Positioning these risks against the very real fact that demand for digital innovation is not going to diminish is key. We need to acknowledge the benefits of developments in digital innovation whilst, in the same breath, raising awareness about how to identify ethical risks and how we must all work together to mitigate these risks.
The whole exercise puts me in mind of a conversation with a 23-year-old about my children's access to technology. I was determined to fight giving them access to mobile phones, thinking I was protecting them from all the inherent risks involved. However, this wise 23-year-old quite simply put it to me that this technology is not going to go away - in fact, it's only going to become more pervasive- and therefore, I'd be much better placed putting my energy into educating my children on how to navigate new technology and any potential threats rather than hiding it from them. This really echoed with me when assessing the usability of all the content that we had been provided from the vast amounts of homework done by various experts.
A real challenge that we experience in ethics in the Data for Children Collaborative is the calling out of potential ethical problems without the follow through of ‘and so we should…’. This is a fundamental part of the design of our ethics assessment – a reflective exercise that allows diverse multi-disciplinary team members to unpick potential impacts on a wide range of stakeholders and say how they will re-design their project to assuage or account for these possibilities. As conversations around data ethics and digital ethics mature, it’s now time to stop setting the scene and start solving the problems.
The very fact that the Scottish Government has commissioned this report shows that Scotland is a nation that really does want to get underneath these problems. This report’s goal was to lay out recommendations for collective action and I truly believe Scotland is a nation that values trust, which has been identified as the cornerstone to ethical digital activity.
But back to the collaborative working element of this exercise and our learnings from it. This whole process has shown the importance of listening authentically, transparency, a sprinkle of diplomacy and strong decision-making. On reflection, this is exactly the way that we run our collaborative projects on a day-to-day basis with our amazing range of experts from different fields of life, working together with a common goal. The difference on this occasion is, perhaps, that we didn’t run a little exercise at the start of the process to understand what everyone’s personal ambition of being part of a wider effort was (something we always normally do). Without understanding personal motivators, it makes it harder to ‘hear’ what’s being said when listening to individual contributions to a back-and-forth conversation.
More about the report: