Code Word, Ethics: Collaborating on Guiding Principles for Technologists

Building on our progress over the past year on strengthening approaches to cross-sector technology development, the Digital Impact and Governance Initiative and Public Interest Tech University Network (PIT-UN) programs hosted Code Word, Ethics: Collaborating on Guiding Principles for Technologists at RightsCon 2023 on June 7.

Our goal for the session was to address questions about envisioning a clear path forward for an accessible, fair, and transparent global process to effectively design guiding principles for technologists and an associated framework for operationalization. As technology becomes increasingly integrated into every aspect of our lives—facilitating public services, supporting access to education and jobs, and enabling commerce and communications—it is imperative that digital solutions are developed and used ethically.

RightsCon is the world’s leading summit on human rights in the digital age and an extraordinary opportunity to convene on topics that encompass a broad range of issues including how to build digital solutions that better reflect public interest values. This year, RightsCon included 8000 participants and more than 600 sessions over three days of hybrid convenings based in Costa Rica.

A few of the marquee RightsCon sessions have recordings online, available here. Like the majority of the programming, our session was not recorded. In the interest of advancing the dialogue and encouraging collaboration, we are sharing a readout and resources from our online roundtable.

Our hope is that we help create the foundations for deeper exploration at the intersection of ethics, technology, and governance issues.

We designed an interactive RightsCon discussion attended by 30 conference participants and facilitated by Afua Bruce, Principal, ANB Advisory Group, Dr. Charles McElroy, Assistant Professor of Information Systems, College of Business, Cleveland State University, Allison Price, Senior Advisor, Digital Impact and Governance Initiative at New America, and Sophie Stone, Ph.D. Candidate and Research Assistant, University of Edinburgh.

We attempted to address the following questions:

1. Are guiding principles of ethics needed in the technology ecosystem today?
2. Are guiding principles of ethics possible to implement?
3. Who needs to be a part of the drafting and implementation process?
4. What mechanisms (legislation, regulation, safeguards, codes of employee conduct, etc) should be leveraged to ensure accountability of different stakeholders?

This work builds on the RightsCon 2022 discussions about technology and ethics between Administrator Samantha Power (USAID) and Anne-Marie Slaughter (New America) and a subsequent panel with technology experts. Our 2023 dialogue amplified the work from the roundtable discussions hosted by four universities over the past few months: CEPI FGV Direito-São Paulo (Brazil), Cleveland State University (USA), Stillman College (USA), and University of Edinburgh (Scotland) to advance the global dialogue.

Throughout this past year, over 200 instructors, students, industry professionals, public servants, civil society members, activists, and innovators gathered to discuss the value and potential of using guiding principles as a tool to better embed ethics into technology and innovation.

We used the findings document from these PIT-UN roundtables as the basis for the conversation: Report: Guiding Principles for Technologists Could Bolster an Inclusive Digital Future. The overall conclusion from our discussions is to empower the creation of a framework broad enough to be practical and accessible for general use and understanding, specific enough for applicability and accountability, and flexible enough to respond to ongoing processes and refinement.

To level-set, we kicked off the session with a poll: Do you think there should be a global, values-based framework of guiding principles for technologists? 88% of respondents selected “yes”; 12% of respondents selected “maybe”; and 0% of respondents selected “no”. Given that participants elected to attend this session, we weren’t too surprised by the findings. But it did serve as encouragement that the topic continues to strike a chord with the broader human rights and digital development community.

Other areas the RightsCon session covered included the following findings:

• People often talk about incorporating many perspectives and global voices, but often don't talk practically of how to do it. Any discussion serious about grappling with codes of ethics must consider how it can be operationalized across many different and nuanced contexts and actors.
• Balancing the need to be effective and forward-looking while also creating a tool that is responsive to known issues.
• Dealing with ethics in technology development is like dealing with an infection. If you don't take the full course of antibiotics – or in this case address ethics from the start – you risk the infection coming back even stronger.
• Codes of ethics or conduct have the potential to establish ethical principles and shape better technology development and use, but it is important to acknowledge they can also be leveraged in other ways. For example, companies or entities could potentially draw on them to stifle competition or certain areas of innovation.
• It is challenging but essential to identify and align incentives when working in multi stakeholder spaces (companies, intelligence community, civil society, hackers -- assessing who wants and needs what). Yet codes that are developed with meaningful participatory commitment can help give a platform to historically marginalized peoples, cultures and topics. As a result, these dialogues and processes could become vehicles for change.

This effort has time and again highlighted the interest and need for sustaining an ongoing dialogue around the development of technologist guiding principles focused on global inclusion, cross-sector collaboration, and equity could build upon the work of the many individuals and organizations exploring various codes for technologists or working in the field of tech governance.

Providing an open and inclusive forum to begin consolidating these conversations could be a real benefit for the field of responsible technology use.

In this spirit, we are sharing links to the resources we created for RightsCon and the roundtables with the hope that we can continue to move towards a more ethical development and implementation of technology in our societies.

Session Resources

• Report: Guiding Principles for Technologists Could Bolster an Inclusive Digital Future. This report compiles a summary of key insights and recommendations from foundational convenings and conversations about ethics and technology, including at RightsCon 2022, Center for Education and Research on Innovation (CEPI) FGV Direito (São Paulo, Brazil), Cleveland State University (U.S.), Stillman College (U.S.), and University of Edinburgh (Scotland).
• RightsCon 2023 session facilitation document. This document was shared with the RightsCon 2023 online roundtable participants and provides guiding questions for open dialogues on the merits and challenges of establishing Guiding Principles for Technologists broken into four categories: content, process, implementation and enforcement. It also includes five questions to be addressed that were submitted by participants.