This EAGER project contributes to a longstanding goal of factoring societal values into the design and creation of information technologies. It offers a novel model for fostering collaboration between experts in social analysis and in science and engineering. The model is being honed and tested in the context of large Future Internet Architecture (FIA) projects. These projects are ideal test beds because, like the existing Internet, they must aspire not only to meet criteria of technical excellence but to meet societal expectations for the future to promote and embody values such as innovation, productivity, security, human development, openness, broad and equitable access, accountability, privacy, and more. This EAGER model is intended not to replace existing cross-disciplinary collaborative models but to supplement them.
Intellectual Merit: From an assembled multi-disciplinary team of 10-15 experts in social analysis of IT and digital media, sub-groups of approximately 3-4 will participate in FIA-PI meetings. At these meetings, team members serve as analysts and consultants. They will help to identify junctures of values-critical technical decision-making, locate design features that differentially call values into play, articulate rich conceptual understandings of relevant values, operationalize values for implementation, consider implications for law and policy, and where possible, to design verification strategies. All of the above, constitute components of a general family of approaches known as Values-in-Design (VID).
Broader Impacts: The model holds distinctive promise because it facilitates repeated exposure to complex technical systems-under-development to a rotating cross-section of experts in social analysis. These activities constitute an opportunity rarely, if ever, provided in discipline-oriented institutions. As such, it facilitates more effective matching of expertise and interest with particular problems, at particular phases of design. In the longer term, the goal is to engender ongoing collaborations and, ultimately, systems and mechanisms that reflect and are deeply responsive to societal values.
This grant supported the creation of a Values-in-Design Council, a multi-disciplinary team of experts in the philosophical, social and legal analysis of digital technologies and networks as NSF’s Future Internet Architecture Initiative (FIA). Council members worked with the FIA projects, helping to identify junctures in the design process in which values-critical technical decisions arise; locating design parameters and variations that differentially call into play relevant values; for and with respective projects, developing rich conceptual understandings of relevant values; for and with project investigators, operationalizing values to enable transition from values conceptions into design features; with FIA investigators, examining the interplay of values embodied in design with respective values embodied in law and policy; and where possible, verifying values in design through prototyping, user testing and other empirical analyses. The project made significant contributions by providing an approach to analyzing and designing technology that recommends social values serve as design requirements alongside more traditional technical constraints. This approach can be differentiated from others in that it seeks to consider ethical and societal issues in the process of development and not, as others, to study the consequences of technology after it has been deployed. Beyond potential contributions to the general understand of social dimensions of technology, the project yield insights into how to operationalize abstract concepts such as security, privacy, etc. and how to implement them in architecture, protocol, mechanism. The PI gave 2 presentations, participated in 1 conference, developed a privacy research center, created a bibliography and "special collections", 1 website and mobile apps. The project also resulted in teaching, training and learning opportunities.
