Minimum ethical standards for ICTD/ICT4D research

This document is a proposal for a set of minimum ethical standards to be applied in ICTD/ICT4D Research. It is a response to a call for ethical minimum standards for the interdisciplinary ICTD/ICT4D research community. This documents draws on existing guidelines from different disciplines which were reviewed collectively in a participatory process for their usefulness for our research community. This participatory process included a series of workshops involving researchers, practitioners and students working in the ICTD/ICT4D domain. These #ICTDEthics workshops took place at ICTD 2016 conference, Ann Arbor, Michigan USA,; ICT4D Meetup, London UK, January 2017; ICTDevers workshop, Cape Town, South Africa, April 2017; IFIP Working Group 9.4 Conference, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, May 2017. A draft of these standards has been reviewed on-line and discussed in open workshops at the ICTD 2017 conference in Lahore, Pakistan in November 2017, and the MERLTech conference in London in May 2018. These #ICTDEthics workshops have been facilitated by Andy Dearden and Dorothea Kleine, who also collated responses, and then edited and drafted this final text. This text will be presented for endorsement at the 10th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development in Ahmedabad, India, in January 2019

Ethical standards for the ICTD/ICT4D community: A participatory process and a co-created document

We recommend reading this poster in combination with the full ethical standards document: [LINK omitted for review] ICTD/ICT4D research is multi-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder and based in different cultural contexts, yet in recent years calls have been heard to agree minimum ethical standards across this field. This paper documents the participatory process we co-facilitated in response to these calls on behalf of the community, and presents the resulting document as collectively agreed set of minimum ethical standards, to be reviewed and updated in years to come. We call on journals, conference organizers, reviewers, ethics committees, institutional review boards and funders to uphold these standards and support their implementation

Interdisciplinarity, Self-governance and Dialogue: The Participatory Process underpinning the Minimum Ethical Standards for ICTD/ICT4D Research

Concerns about ethical issues in ICTD/ICT4D research have been growing in recent years, alongside calls to agree minimum ethical standards. This paper reflects on the three-year participatory process, co-facilitated by the authors, that has led to collective agreement on such a set of minimum ethical standards for ICTD/ICT4D research. The standards have been published (at http://www.ictdethics.org) under a Creative Commons licence, and are open for further comment. The current version has been endorsed by the ICTD conference series, and there is ongoing dialogue about their implementation by other conferences, journals, and funding bodies. While the standards themselves are a collective effort, in this paper the facilitators lay out their own specific thinking and approach to the co-production process that they designed and facilitated. It considers the successes, potential for further improvement, as well as critical features underpinning the standards’ legitimacy. These reflections may help guide other research communities interested in such participatory self-regulation processes

Health Advice from Internet Discussion Forums: How Bad Is Dangerous?

Background: Concerns over online health information–seeking behavior point to the potential harm incorrect, incomplete, or biased information may cause. However, systematic reviews of health information have found few examples of documented harm that can be directly attributed to poor quality information found online. Objective: The aim of this study was to improve our understanding of the quality and quality characteristics of information found in online discussion forum websites so that their likely value as a peer-to-peer health information–sharing platform could be assessed. Methods: A total of 25 health discussion threads were selected across 3 websites (Reddit, Mumsnet, and Patient) covering 3 health conditions (human immunodeficiency virus [HIV], diabetes, and chickenpox). Assessors were asked to rate information found in the discussion threads according to 5 criteria: accuracy, completeness, how sensible the replies were, how they thought the questioner would act, and how useful they thought the questioner would find the replies. Results: In all, 78 fully completed assessments were returned by 17 individuals (8 were qualified medical doctors, 9 were not). When the ratings awarded in the assessments were analyzed, 25 of the assessments placed the discussion threads in the highest possible score band rating them between 5 and 10 overall, 38 rated them between 11 and 15, 12 rated them between 16 and 20, and 3 placed the discussion thread they assessed in the lowest rating band (21-25). This suggests that health threads on Internet discussion forum websites are more likely than not (by a factor of 4:1) to contain information of high or reasonably high quality. Extremely poor information is rare; the lowest available assessment rating was awarded only 11 times out of a possible 353, whereas the highest was awarded 54 times. Only 3 of 78 fully completed assessments rated a discussion thread in the lowest possible overall band of 21 to 25, whereas 25 of 78 rated it in the highest of 5 to 10. Quality assessments differed depending on the health condition (chickenpox appeared 17 times in the 20 lowest-rated threads, HIV twice, and diabetes once). Although assessors tended to agree on which discussion threads contained good quality information, what constituted poor quality information appeared to be more subjective. Conclusions: Most of the information assessed in this study was considered by qualified medical doctors and nonmedically qualified respondents to be of reasonably good quality. Although a small amount of information was assessed as poor, not all respondents agreed that the original questioner would have been led to act inappropriately based on the information presented. This suggests that discussion forum websites may be a useful platform through which people can ask health-related questions and receive answers of acceptable quality

Digital Reset: Redirecting Technologies for the Deep Sustainability Transformation

Governments worldwide hope that digital technologies can provide key solutions. Yet this report shows that digitalisation, in its current and mainstream form, is rather aggravating than solving many of the pressing social and environmental crises at hand. What is needed instead is a deep sustainability transformation that fundamentally reorganises the economy and all its sectors - agriculture, mobility, energy, buildings, industry, and consumption. The Report »Digital Reset« shows how digital technologies can support the quest for such a deep sustainability transformation. The report provides a blueprint for the European Union on how to reconceptualise digitalisation so that it first and foremost contributes to achieving carbon neutrality, resource autonomy and economic resilience while supporting equity and fully respecting citizen's rights and privacy. The report is the outcome of a two-year international science-policy dialogue, »Digitalization for Sustainability« (D4S), and presents an up-to-date comprehensive analysis of opportunities, risks and governance options regarding digitalization and sustainability