Discussing the role of ethics in Research & Innovation is an important aspect of the technological progress we make today, and therefore contributes to the sustainable development goal on industry and innovation. In this context, the task of structuring such discussions of ethics with the business processes they relate to is di cult due to a lack of methodologies and existing use-cases. The Ethics Canvas o ers a tool that uses a model based on the Business Model Canvas to structure discussions around ethical implications. We present a way to relate such ethical considerations with their business process using the semantic web. This will allow an investigation of how business models and ethics a ect each other, and to structure discussions around this relation. The approach also allows discovering related ethical implications through the Ethics Canvas tool for a richer discussion surrounding ethics.
The UN sustainable development goal for Industry, Innovation and
Infrastructure [
Copying permitted for private and academic purposes. testing; and ex-post, when technology from R&I is mature and the technology is applied. From a comprehensive literature review of R&I ethics approaches [8] Reijers et al recommend that: ethical technological design should be integrated into the day-to-day work of R&I practitioners; with guidance for discerning the ethical nature of technology design choices and how ethical principles can be balanced; di erent socio-technical alternatives considered; and stakeholder participation should be broadened while being guided by democratic principles.
The rapid commercialisation of digital technology R&I demonstrates how implementing such recommendations cannot be addressed solely within the connes of policies for publicly-funded research. It must instead be based on an open and honest debate with commercial R&I practitioners about appropriate methodologies and possible regulatory actions needed to enable viable ethical practice that can balance the commercial bene ts of digital technology with the broader social good. The focus on ethics is also signi cant for the funding of R&I. While publicly funded research is already served by institutional ethics guidelines, these are not applied systematically as knowledge is transferred to the commercial sector, i.e. as a given technology transitions from a research to an innovation phase. This transition is increasingly the focus of public co-funding as governments strive to improve the economic and social impact of research through commercial innovation. In parallel, Environmental, Socials and Governance criteria are growing in importance for commercial investors concerned about the ethical impact of innovation investments.
Innovation ethics have to a large extent been subsumed into broader a
discussion of ethics in R&I, often as part of policies around Responsible R&I, i.e.
without di erentiating the speci c needs of innovation ethics in industry from
those of research ethics. An early exploration of this distinction [
The Ethics Canvas consists of nine thematic blocks that are grouped together in four stages of completion. The rst stage (blocks 1, 2) requires identifying the stakeholders involved based on the technology under consideration. These are respectively the classes of individuals a ected and the types of groups a ected, where groups would have some form of advocate or representation that could potentially engage on ethical issues. The emphasis here is on identifying stakeholders who are not necessarily users and partners in the innovation, but are nevertheless impacted by it. These are then used to identify potential ethical impacts for the identi ed stakeholders in stage two (blocks 3-6). The impact includes changes in the behavior of the classes of individuals, changes in the relationships between classes of individuals or between individuals and groups, or con icts that might arise between a ected groups. Non-stakeholder speci c ethical impacts are also analysed in stage three (blocks 7, 8), addressing the impact of service/system failure of and resource use by the innovative technology. Stage four (block 9) consists of discussions structured around overcoming ethical impacts identi ed in the previous stages.
The ethics canvas can be printed or used as a web application5 that can be used with or without an account. Analyses can be downloaded as either a 5 https://www.ethicscanvas.org Identify the types or categories of individuals affected by the product or service, such as men/women, user/non- user, age-category, etc.
The ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology is funded under the SFI Research Centres Programme (Grant 13/RC/2106) and is co-funded under the European Regional Development Fund. .
Individuals affected
Behaviour
What can we do?
Worldviews Project Title:
Date:
Ethics Canvas v1.8 - ethicscanvas.org © ADAPT Centre & Trinity Col ege
Dublin & Dublin City University, 2017.
Groups affected Identify the col ectives or communities, e.g. groups or organisations, that can be affected by your product or service, such as environmental and religious groups, unions, professional bodies, competing companies and government agencies, considering any interest they might have in the effects of the product or service.
1 Product or Service Failure Discuss the potential negative impact of your product or service failing to operate as intended,eg technical or human error, financial failure/ receivership/acquisition, security breach, data loss, etc.
9 7
Problematic Use of Resources Discuss possible negative impacts of the consumption of resources of your project, e.g. climate impacts, privacy impacts, employment impacts etc.
2 8 Discuss problematic changes to individual behaviour that may be prompted by the application e.g. differences in habits, time-schedules, choice of activities, people behaving more individualistic or col ectivist, people behaving more or less materialistic.
Select the four most important Ethical impacts you discussed.
Identify ways of solving these Impacts by changing your project’s product/service design, organisation.Or by providing recommendations for its use or spel ing out more clearly to users the values driving the design Relations Discuss problematic differences in individual behaviour such as differences in habits, time-schedules, choice of activities, etc 3 4
Discuss how the general perception of somebody’s role in society can be affected by the project, Group Conflicts Discuss the impact on the relationships between the groups identified, e.g. employers and unions 5 6 The Ethics Canvas is adapted from Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas. The Business Model Canvas is designed by: Business Model Foundry AG. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons At ribution-Share Alike 3.0 unported license. To view a copy of this license, visit ht ps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/. To view the original Business Model Canvas, visit ht ps://strategyzer.com/canvas.
JSON representation of the text entered into each block.
The online version allows for collaborative editing of an
comment threads on individual block entries and tagging of strings within a block entry used (see entering a similar tag in their own canvas design, thereby o ering the opportunity to cross reference between canvases and establish a shared folksonomy of
Canvas entry tags. The source of the application is hosted online
and is available 6 under the CC-by-SA 3.0 license.
The design of the
Ethics
Canvas has itself followed an iterative process over the last three years. The canvas was observed in use with di erent cohorts of university students at undergraduate, Masters and PhD levels, across computer science, engineering and business disciplines.
To date nearly 500 students have used the canvas. This has been in a combination of: ex-ante practice exercises, where students analyse emerging technologies; intra practice exercises, where students apply the ethics canvas to an active technology development or analysis pro ject they are working on; or ex-post practice where they business analysed the ethics of existing technology products. In the most recent evaluation of intra practice, use of the
Ethics
https://opengogs.adaptcentre.ie/ADAPT/ethics- canvas
of a BMC for di erent digital technology innovation projects with positive
usability results and some observed design pivots arising from the ethical assessment
[
In particular, there is a possibility of using the various arguments discussed in other related canvases, including the BMC, on the Ethics Canvas platform. Such an approach would, in theory, allow the user to investigate similar ethical considerations to the ones they are currently investigating in di erent business contexts. This is quite similar to looking up how similar businesses operate and using their experience within the context of understanding the challenges of a new start-up. In the context of considering ethical impacts, the discussion would involve both the Ethics Canvas and the BMC to provide a comprehensive view of how innovation and ethics a ect each other. Therefore, linking the BMC with its relevant Ethics Canvas is an important part of our evolving approach to tools and support for innovation ethics. This can be done based on the structure of the two canvas models. Both the business and ethics canvases are structured into blocks, and have individual ideas or segments populating each block based on context. Linking the related blocks or ideas between the two should provide a good context for how the two a ect each other. Next we explore how we can implement this using semantic web technologies.
Canvas-driven Ethics Vocabulary To support the broader use of the ethics canvas, we propose an open data vocabulary to formalise and interlink the structured output of the online canvas entries (already available in JSON) using Linked Open Data Vocabularies. This vocabulary (outlined in Figure. 3) provides support for the following features. Grouped Business and Ethics canvas perspectives: The vocabulary groups both business model canvases and ethics canvases under a Project class. This enables analyses to o er both canvas types to both i) contextualise the ethical analysis in the business context for ex-ante and ex-post practice and ii) group the ethics canvas with a business canvas during intra practice by innovation teams. By subclassing Project from the Dataset object of the W3C DCAT7 standard, a set of canvases can be grouped and managed as a data set using other cataloguing metadata features of DCAT. This includes the ability to create a distribution version of a dataset, which would allow for a set of canvases developed within an organisation to be di erentiated from a version that was exposed more widely, including possible license terms. This would be critical in intra practice where the possibility that a data set of business and ethics canvases developed during an innovation project could be published should not impede the honest and critical development of those canvases internally. Therefore a `cleaning' process to map internal canvases to ones suitable for wider consumption should be supported, e.g. removing comments, re-wording tags for indexing as part of a wider canvas repositories, including only the most recent versions of canvases and removing con dential information or trade secrets.
Canvas design evolution and variation: A general Canvas and BlockEntry 7 https://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat/ class is used which is then subclassed in this case by the business model canvas and ethics canvas types and their block types as described above. There are however a variety of di erent innovation-focussed canvas designs available in addition to the Business Model Canvas, e.g. the Lean Model Canvas. In addition, canvas designs for other non-business concerns such as environmental or privacy issues are also emerging. This class design therefore allows di erent canvas designs to be used and integrated into the same project. This is key, at the very least, in supporting the anticipated continued evolution of the Ethics Canvas design.
Canvas iteration and logging: The core a ordance of the canvas approach
is its use to rapidly capture, test and modify ideas in an iterative and
evidencedriven, pivot or proceed process [
As a proof of concept we developed a small corpora of 102 articles annotated with a similar number of tags for each of 5 classi cations, based on English language news articles gathered in January 2018. While the annotation of impacts proved unfeasible due to their multifaceted nature, 5 classi cations related to the ethics canvas were found to be amenable for use in annotating the corpus. These were: ethical issues; stakeholder classes (i.e. classes of individuals); speci c organisations; resources; and technologies. Experiments with term frequency and its inverse document frequency using this corpora showed potential for useful text classi cation of news articles if a larger annotated training corpus could be assembled. So while the annotated corpora was too small to provide accurate results in classifying articles, it o ers a direction especially for conducting ex-ante and ex-post ethical analyses. Automated annotation of news articles and blog postings indexed against tags linked to published ethics canvases o ers the chance to encourage much wider stakeholder involvement in the analysis of emerging or recent ethics issues. Using tags to nd and lter streams of related articles for those using the ethics canvas to analyse an issue considerably lowers the bar for engaging in such analyses in comparison to academic literature surveys. It also o ers a systematic way of identifying shifts in issues, technologies and actors in such textual corpora that could be used to motivate further corpora development and NLP tool training. 4
Responsible Innovation is becoming recognised as a topic deserving of study, support and guidance separate to the more well established area of Responsible Research. While a body of literature is starting to emerge, few practical tools for ethical analysis in active commercial innovation settings are available. Furthermore, existing methodologies often rely on embedded ethical expertise and therefore seem unlikely to scale to the pace of innovation and breadth of stakeholder involvement required to address ethics in digital technology innovation. We have previously proposed aligning ethical analyses with the lightweight, unmediated canvas a ordance that has become widely adopted for business analysis in the digital technology innovation sector and have developed practical tools to implement this approach. In this paper, we argue that such an approach could be leveraged to enable broader industry and societal engagement in the ethical analysis and debate of the emergent ethical issues associated with digital technologies. To enable this ex-ante, intra and ex-post practice, we propose an open data vocabulary to support the logging, sharing, searching and interlinking of instances of ethical analysis.
We are currently extending the existing Ethics Canvas implementation to support the capture and publication of such analyses. This will be released as an update to the current open source platform with features for publishing linked business canvases to open data repositories. Future work will also explore indexing published interlinked ethics-business canvas models to support the federated search of tags and concepts across published data sets. The use of text classi cation and named entity recognition to index news articles that may in future inform both ex-ante and ex-post use of the canvas tool is also a target for further exploration. Future work will also include the evaluation of this approach for intra practice in ICT (Information & Communications Technology) innovation classroom settings as well as with active ICT innovation project teams. Its future use in ex-post practice will be explored in educational setting with non-ICT students, which will require seeding it with a set of business model canvas data sets based on existing digital technology applications. Opportunities to develop further usage guidance and support materials for employing and publishing linked business and ethics canvases as linked open data will be explored to improve uptake both as an educational and research tool.
This work is supported by the ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology which is funded under the SFI Research Centres Programme (Grant 13/RC/2106) and is co-funded under the European Regional Development Fund. 8. Reijers, W., Wright, D., Brey, P., Weber, K., Rodrigues, R., O'Sullivan, D., Gordijn, B.: Methods for practising ethics in research and innovation: A literature review, critical analysis and recommendations. Science and engineering ethics pp. 1{45 (2017)