How might we share responsible tech learning for the greatest impact? — Part 1/3
The Responsible Tech Collective is a community of cross-sector organisations and community representatives based in Greater Manchester who together want to put people first when it comes the the creation and deployment of technology.
Our vision is to establish Greater Manchester as an equitable, inclusive and sustainable exemplar for ethical tech. Our mission is to bring home the humanity to tech through systemic responsibility and personal empowerment. More detail about our purpose can be found in a previous blog here.
Our values are deeply embedded into our practice and in how we engage with one another:
Our Practice
- We foster deeper and wider understanding of responsible technology and recognising progress (over expecting perfection) within organisations at different levels of ethical maturity
- We encourage courageous conversations about what’s possible (over reactive and punitive action) and holding ourselves accountable against the standards and practises we establish
- We create tangible and meaningful impact (over ethics washing) and working openly to raise the profile of the responsible tech movement
Our People
- We empathise with and caring for diverse groups and marginalised communities plus being inclusive through addressing our individual and organisational biases
- We work collaboratively with (and not for) those influenced and impacted by technology and driving action around our shared intentions
- We lead by example in putting people, both internal and external to our organisations, first and influencing others to do the same
The collective is led by Noisy Cricket, a social impact agency. The collective is still in the ‘co-creation’ phase, and as such, we are still testing how our infrastructure could work and what projects we should focus on.
We’ve identified five different opportunities to develop our infrastructure:
- How might we share individual learning and enable collective progress?
- How might we engage people and communities in the design and development of technology?
- How might we demonstrate the business value of responsible tech and its ability to meet business goals?
- How might we set standards and shape best practice?
- How might we enable policy, process and practice adoption?
![A slide that displays the five different opportunity areas identified by members of the collective, shown in five circles [listed in bullet point format above the image]. The prioritised opportunity is shown by a highlighted, light green circle.](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*jdL1mHI4RuOnRet6aINwLw.png)
As a collective, we have prioritised one area to start with, and that is:
“How might we share individual learning and enable collective progress?”
To explore this opportunity, we are running a series of design and research sprints, involving user research and co-creation workshops with both Responsible Tech Collective members and non-members. We wish to explore how we can create mechanisms to support the sharing of learning within the collective, which can then be disseminated impactfully beyond it, to influence positive change in the tech industry in Greater Manchester and further afield.
Design Questions
We have a mixture of open-ended lines of enquiry to explore, as well as more specific hypotheses to test, covering the following focus areas:
Lines of Enquiry
- Value: understanding the value of individual and collective learning
- Collective vs. individual: exploring how to define individual and collective progress
- Sharing learning: identifying the most impactful ways to share our individual and collective learning
- Audiences: defining key stakeholders, audiences and their needs and exploring what helps and hinders implementing practice change
Hypotheses
- Visibility and Momentum-Building: storytelling is key to inspiring and catalysing practice change within organisations, industry and society
- Collective Perspective: to catalyse real change, it’s crucial that we create space for one another’s humanity in the work and work empathetically and courageously together
- Partnership Working: fostering partnerships within the collective will amplify the work
- Organisational Transformation First: only when organisations have done the internal work to change their practices can they successfully play a role in influencing the wider system
- Psychological Safety & Support: psychological safety and emotional support in the collective is crucial to empowering collective work and to create momentum around the work
Methodology and Approach
We are following a fairly classical design approach, with a lot of room to iterate and pivot depending on what we learn.
Get Involved
If you’d like to get involved, we are recruiting participants for our first sprint: user research. We are looking for three or four existing Responsible Tech Collective members and three to four non-members from private, public and third sector organisations in Greater Manchester who are interested in how their organisation can use data and tech more ethically and play a role in influencing change across the wider tech industry.
At this time, we’re focussing on more senior roles (C-Suite, directors, heads of departments), but if this isn’t you, do still get in touch if you would be interested in taking part in a later research stage.
Please take a look at this google form for more details.
We’re looking to conduct these interviews w/c 14th and 21st February. If you are interested, please fill out your details in the link above and we (Lauren Coulman and Emma Diamond of Noisy Cricket) will get in touch. Any questions, please contact Emma at emma@noisycricket.org.uk.
We’ll be posting regular updates on this blog, so watch this space!
