Stakeholders

From Etica_wiki

This page listed stakeholders identified by the ETICA project as cardinal to influencing policy in relation to emerging technologies and ethics. The page mainly focuses on stakeholders who have been directly singled out in the policy recommendations that the project has come up with. The project also endeavoured to involve a cross-section of stakeholders in its research process who among others included lay people in the UK and Finland as part of focus group discussants whose results are reflected in focus group reports 1, 2 and 3 and ICT developers whose findings are reflected here. The identified stakeholders and the recommendations directly related to them are as follows:

Policy Makers

Policy makers have an important role to create the regulatory framework and the infrastructure to allow ethics to be considered in ICT. ETICA recommends the following three main areas of policy activity:

Provide regulatory framework which will support Ethical Impact Assessment for ICTs

• To raise awareness of the importance of ethics in new ICTs
• To encourage ethical reflexivity within ICT research and development
• To provide appropriate tools and methods to identify and address ethical issues
• To establish a forum for ongoing consultations with the public and stakeholders to provide position papers for policy input
• To address the wide range of current and new ethical issues arising from ICT, modelled along the lines of environmental, privacy or equality impact assessments
• To allow ICT professionals to use their expertise in emerging ICTs to contribute to ethical solutions
• To raise awareness of ethical reflexion regarding animals and environmental issues

Establish an ICT Ethics Observatory

• To collect and communicate the conceptual, methodological, procedural and substantive aspects of ICT ethics
• To provide a community-owned publicly accessible repository and dissemination tool of research on ICT ethics
• To give examples of approaches and governance structures that allow addressing ethical issues
• To disseminate past and current research ethics and ICT including relevant work packages and deliverables and relevant National Ethics Committee opinions
• To facilitate the Ethical Impact Assessment
• To provide an early warning mechanism for issues that may require legislation

Establish a forum for stakeholder involvement

• To allow and encourage civil society and its representations, industry, NGOs and other stakeholders to exchange ideas and express their views
• To exchange experience between different stakeholders in order to develop ethical reflexivity in the discussion
• To reach consensus concerning good practice in the area of ethics and ICT
• To build a bridge between civil society and policy makers

Industry, Researchers and Civil Society Organisations

Industry, researchers and other individuals or organisations should adhere to the following recommendations in order to be proactive and allow innovation to be socially responsible.

Incorporate ethics into ICT research and development

• To make explicit that ethical sensitivity is in the interest of ICT users and providers
• To distinguish between law and ethics and see that following legal requirements is not always sufficient to address ethical issues
• To engage in discussion of what constitutes ethical issues and be open to incorporation of gender, environmental and other issues

Facilitate ethical reflexivity in ICT projects and practice

• To realise that ethical issues are context-dependent and need specific attention of individuals with local knowledge and understanding
• To simultaneously consider the identification of ethical issues and their resolutions
• To be open about the description of the project and its ethical issues
• To encourage broader stakeholder engagement in the identification and resolution of ethical questions.

The above recommendations are a result and synthesis of the various recommendations that have emitted from the different ETICA work packages, in particular, WP2, WP3 and WP4. These are outlined below and in accordance to the packages:

Work Package 2

• The need to address ethical issues at an early phase of development of technology applications. This is feasible by using approaches such as Value Sensitive Design (VSD) which can be incorporated at the early stages of technology design process in which moral values form an intrinsic part of the design process. By using the VSD-approach in the development phase of applications the discerned ethical issues could be addressed in an early stage of the application development, possibly preventing actual harm stemming from these issues. But regardless whether more elaborate approaches such as VSD will be deployed; raising awareness and increasing insight among researchers, policymakers and other stakeholders of the existence of these serious ethical issues remains paramount.

Work Package 3

Technology Assessment

Technology Assessment assesses both the negative and positive consequences of technologies. The recommendation from this particular component is that there is need:

• To incorporate studies on ethical, legal and social issues in the ICT projects and/or to launch calls for such studies to accompany ongoing projects for technical development.

Ethics

Basing the ethical evaluation on European ethics and in particular on a list of values and principles based on the EU Charter which includes Human Dignity, Freedom, Justice (Equality and Solidarity), Principle of Proportionality, Precautionary Principle and the Principle of Transparency, the recommendations under this component include the need:

• For the creation of a data bank on ethical issues especially from committees like National (Bio-)Ethics Committees (NEC) which can help interested parties easily search for and access information in order to keep abreast with developments.

• For the creation of a data bank on ethics within EU research which not only includes projects, but also relevant work packages and deliverables. This will not only help with minimising duplication of work but will help research entities be aware of similar other existing bodies of work which may encourage collaboration and knowledge sharing.

• To not only have human centred research when it comes to computer and information ethics, but to also consider and extend research on animals or environmental issues.

Legal

From a legal point of view which considered new member states, the following recommendations arise:

• A new set of basic principles and criteria should be worked out in detail for the use of emerging technologies with special regard to individual choice, consent and transparency. Existing principles from international documents such as the data protection principles should be adapted to the new circumstances.
• The principle of purpose specificity should be extended to emerging technologies. Although technology is not neutral in itself, similar ICT support can be used e.g. for laying and for removing of land mines, still the choice must not be regarded as a mere question of freedom of scientific research.
• Legal education should include up-to-date information and practice regarding emerging technologies.
• Legal science should work out adequate regulatory strategies for different scenarios regarding the developing and applying of emerging technologies, including the convergence of separate technologies.
• Adequate forums should be established in order to ensure regular communication between lawmakers and other stakeholders (researchers, developers, service providers, users) in the areas of emerging technologies.
• An adequate and coherent system of notions and definitions regarding the use of emerging technologies should be worked out and regularly reviewed.
• Lawmakers should create a legal environment inspiring self-regulatory acts based on commonly accepted principles.
• Fast and efficient control mechanisms should be established with appropriate intervention points, in order to enforce laws regulating the use of emerging technologies.
• Taking Privacy Impact Assessment as an example, the principles and methodology of Ethical Impact Assessment should be worked out.

Gender

As a way of trying to combat the inadequate engagement of gender issues in emerging technologies and ethics, the following recommendations are made:

• To engage more women in computer science at all educational levels
• To increase the number of women in the process of ICT design, production and usage taking into account the geopolitical locations and the factors of socio-cultural identifications such as race/ethnicity, class, age, disability, etc.
• To employ gender sensitive approach, which takes gender specificity into consideration, in design and application of ICTs
• To combat “gender blindness” in medicine (Bioelectronics, Neuroelectronics, Robotics, Human-Machine symbiosis)
• To create and promote non-stereotypical types of symbolic representations of technologies, women and men in ICT
• To initiate more research projects that focus on gender and ICT design, application and representation
• To continue research on emerging technologies particularly Quantum Computing, Cloud Computing and Augmented Reality from the viewpoint of gender ethical issues.

Work Package 4

• For a new ethical governance approach that applies ethical reflexivity to ensure an effective, efficient application of values within technology development, and to ensure the ethical nature of these values that are applied.