Data Ethics: Building Ethical Awareness and Reflective Capacity

There are frequent calls for increasing ethical awareness and reflective capacity within institutions that collect, aggregate, analyze and share large amounts of data. However there is very little substantive guidance on how to accomplish this in practice. This project, a collaboration between the Ethics Institute and Accenture, explores the use of oversight committees and review boards help to identify and address issues in data ethics within institutional contexts. The project compares the relative merits of a review board system with other strategies for building ethical capacity, such as a predominantly compliance and training model. The project also details the components of an effective review board or committee based system and what is involved in building one.