This post is some background thinking to participation in the internal workshops focusing on ethics and decentralisation to be held at UTS on 7th and 8th December 2015 as part of the Blockchain workshops.
The background reading material outlines some of the key ethical issues in relation to internet technologies and consequently blockchain technologies such as questions of access, transparency, duty of care, self-regulation and community standards.
Although decentralisation and emerging technologies that blockchain and the internet represent according to the background paper “existing best practices from other fields don’t easily translate” (p. 5 GTC Workshop outcomes paper) these ethical dilemmas are not entirely without precedent.
On reflection these are many of the key issues we have grappled with in broadening access to public broadcasting services which have changed dramatically over the last 15 years from a centralised model of to many broadcasting to a decentralised model of many to many communication channels; driven by changes to digital technology and a digital teams committed to giving a voice to all Australians on this publicly funded broadcasting channels. This post aims to explore some of the complex editorial and ethical challenges faced by the New Media and Innovation teams at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation as we shaped this digital transformation of our public broadcaster much loved and highly trusted by the Australian public.
As pointed out in the background paper the technological framework of the internet and digital economy are complex, multi-faceted and highly dynamic; the first generation of internet developers and activists, in which I count myself, were idealistic and driven by a vision of digital democracy through increased access to the means of media production to drive social change and public benefit. While the channels to support social and cultural change online have certainly benefited those seeking to build public services and public benefit the commercialisation of the internet has also led to a ‘biegification’ of culture and vested commercial and political interests being built into the framework of the technology.
Crowdsourcing geolocation pilots – Queensland floods 2011During the summer of 2011 in Australia there was a series of devastating floods particularly in Queensland and Nothern New South Wales. The ABC as the national broadcaster is the main emergency broadcaster. I was a Senior Producer in the Strategic Development team at ABC Innovation and we had been exploring developments in open source crowd sourced mapping technology Ushahidi and considering how this might be used to cover national events.
We set up an instance of Crowdmap to cover the floods after negotiation with local radio and news department senior editorial teams. The website allowed the public to post reports on areas affected by the floods during the flood such as roads flooded, hazards and debris, sandbagging centres as well as during the recover to post where people could get food, fresh water and tradesmen to help with recovery. The main concerns of the editorial team were around protecting privacy and identity and also the verification of reports coming from the public and resulting duty of care of the organisations.
We agreed on a model where we would accept reports from the public to be posted directly onto the floods map (via online form, twitter or SMS) and that these would be clearly labelled as being unverified or verified. We had a team of ABC local radio journalists also posting reports to the maps and attempting to verify the publicly posted reports, however in reality only a small number of the posts from the public were able to be verified. In this case the potential benefit of having the public being able to post reports in real time was judged as being of more value than the risk of people acting on incorrect information. However it was also acknowledged that if a critical mass of reports were posted these posts could help to cross verify posts in the same area.
During the recovery phase the internet was being widely used to communicate where people could access help and support services. Google set up an online recovery service and Twitter and Facebook were being widely used to connect people looking for loved ones and pets and for food, water, emergency tradesman services etc. In order for this to be a useful services people needed to be able to post contact details and their address or location. It became clear that as a publicly funded institution there were significant restrictions on what services we could offer that was not the case for private individuals or commercial organisations. This seemed somewhat counter-intuitive as the national emergency broadcaster the ABC also had a responsibility to inform the public to the best of it’s ability.
This again presented an editorial and ethical dilemma to the ABC as our editorial policies prevented us from publishing identifying personal information online. While we had the functionality and capacity in the software to set up a significant service to help people find services and support in their local area our editorial policies precluded this. Again after lengthy discussion and negotiation with senior editorial staff it was agreed that we would allow people to post personal details on the map for a limited period of time as the public benefit and urgency was perceived to be of greater value than the potential risks posed. These details were then removed from the map two weeks after the recovery period began to protect the privacy of the participants. The twitter handles were left on the site as these were considered to be in the public domain.
During the federal elections held in Australia in 2012 there was a large volume of public data being posted on social media, forums and blogs in relations to the election. A team of digital producers and User Experience staff at the ABC wanted to explore ways to express the shifts in sentiment during the campaign by building an online dashboard to aggregate and display this data in an engaging way. We set up the Campaign Pulse website which had a number of different modules to experiment with real time display of public sentiment. The data used was largely depersonalised to remove any privacy or identify issues however the usernames of Twitter and Flickr users were published on the site.
The modules included more traditional methods for tracking sentiment such as a poll tracker, bookies odds and tracking location of statements of politicians during the campaign alongside more experimental uses of Twitter trendsmaps and sentiment analysis using natural language analysis. The twitter map built with a tool called Trendsmap, displayed in real time the key terms trending across Australia overlaid on a map of Australia. There was a timeline sitting underneath the map that allowed you to track how key terms were trending over time and in relation to key events in the election campaign such as public debates etc. You could drill down in real time to view the actual tweets and usernames of trending topics.
Another module called ‘Hot or not’ aimed to reflect a daily sentiment rating for each of the leaders of the three main parties using a gauge. This was achieved through analysing over 10,000 posts to blogs, forums, twitter and Facebook each night using natural language analysis to track positive and negative language being used about each leader. This was then aggregated and translated into a score between -100 and +100 for each leader each day and some key positive and negative tweets published on the site. We found the technology still to be in very early stages of development and found that the language analysis often did not pick up on the humour and irony used by Australians in commenting on politicians and the political process.
One goal from the GTC workshop document is to “ensure just governance” but by whose measure? The network, as already explored, is far too broad to have a singular expression for ‘justice’. Here again we can learn from how the media industry tackles the idea of community standards, public attitudes, values and expectations. The media is by no means a perfect example, but the failings and successes of the media’s engagement with these ideas can be revelatory. Ethical considerations are for media often lie outside of legal considerations and are instead held up to community standards to be measured.
Indeed social media now is a key instrument to ensure a level of accountability in both public institutions and private companies whose actions are seen as falling short of public and consumer expectation. This networked approach can have far reaching effects to the reputation of an organisation that fails to self regulate or respond to consumer feedback and complaints.
Despite this the issues of responsibility resulting form the privileged status of the majority of internet and blockchain engineers and ability to exploit specialist knowledge is an important one. Whose responsibility is it to educate and raise awareness of potential harm and exposure of personal details in the technology we use every day? How can consumers give informed consent if they have not been educated to understand how the systems and technology they are using work. Is this education the responsibility of the technology designers, manufacturer or distributors? Is it the responsibility of schools and universities? Or of consumer and legal organisations? Or all of the above?
As is noted in the repeatedly in the background paper the use of technology by the private sector and corporations is not limited by the same constraints as public institutions such as public broadcasters, universities or publicly funded research bodies. With the regulatory and policy framework falling behind the pace of technology development a window opens for companies to exploit capabilities to track user behaviour and experience without their explicit consent and yet researchers seeking to understand the technology and behaviour can not use these capabilities. However the old models of research and ethics need to change to reflect the complex, dynamic mediated network most people now live in. The responsibility of the researcher is to explain to the best of his or her ability their understanding of the technology and the potential implications of the research and impact on the participant. It is not possible to be responsible of accountable for any actions that might arise in the future however risk management and communication is essential to informed consent.
Philosopher Onora O’Neill argues that the expression of media organisations, as with the communications of other institutions, is more powerful than the expression of individuals (not necessarily more valuable; just more powerful). She proposed a test of ‘assessability’. The audience must be able to assess what powerful organisations provide. This, in part at least, is a challenge to the self-regulation frameworks of all media, but especially to those of public service media.
These issues has also arisen repeatedly in opening up the ABC website to publish user generated content or UGC. In order for the audience to post their or media and stories there is an element of risk which was initially considered unacceptable. This risk becomes magnified in the case of children and young people. However through developing robust and considered editorial policies to apply to UGC the public broadcaster has been able to publish tens of thousands of Australian stories to reflect the real stories of Australia. In regional and rural Australia ABC Open has successfully trained community members to produce and publish their own stories over the last ten years. https://open.abc.net.au Specific editorial policies for children and young people to limit the personal information published to a first name and general location has also allowed children to publish their own stories to the ABC3 Rawr http://www.abc.net.au/abc3/rawr/
These parallels in the process of adapting the public media models to meet the needs of a complex networked digital environment while keeping alive the integrity, independence, transparency and accountability have been challenging and are by no means over. Hopefully these transitions can add some value to the discussion of the ethics of decentralisation for Blockchain technology and more broadly as digital transformation moves through the economy.
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