MEETUP: Ethical Technology London
Last night I had a fun time in that there London town, for a meetup organised by Cennydd Bowles. I had become aware of the event after reading his post A techie’s rough guide to GDPR. This was also a fairly rare trip to the Silicon Roundabout for me, and I was struck by how much it has changed recently.
It was a low key, informal event with no agenda. Just interested (and interesting!) people talking about ethics and technology. Among the people I talked to were Anne who is organising an Ethical track at QCon, Rachel who had a brilliant ice break around topics that we thought would help keep technology ethical. Mark's answer that the fast scaling was an issue was more convincing than mine that "transparency" would be the answer. To paraphrase, he said that companies like Uber, AirBnB, and Facebook had probably scaled much quicker than their corporate governance and leadership could scale. The ecosystems that develop around these companies also further diluted the ethical leadership.
That really resonated with me, as looking back over my career processing and data storage is much, much less thought about. It's just not something that we really have to think about for most applications. Compare that to the extreme data efficiency that lead to the millennium bug due to cutting two bytes!
Another really interesting find for me was Richard talking about a "Data sharing pattern catalogue" project at IF. It seemed like a really obvious thing when he mentioned it. Looking at the work they share I think it's brilliant, to help teams that may not be used to approaches for sharing data to give them pointers of good patterns to follow. And it's open to outside contributors, so has the potential to be a really useful living body of knowledge.
All-in-all a good night learning about what others are up to.
It was a low key, informal event with no agenda. Just interested (and interesting!) people talking about ethics and technology. Among the people I talked to were Anne who is organising an Ethical track at QCon, Rachel who had a brilliant ice break around topics that we thought would help keep technology ethical. Mark's answer that the fast scaling was an issue was more convincing than mine that "transparency" would be the answer. To paraphrase, he said that companies like Uber, AirBnB, and Facebook had probably scaled much quicker than their corporate governance and leadership could scale. The ecosystems that develop around these companies also further diluted the ethical leadership.
That really resonated with me, as looking back over my career processing and data storage is much, much less thought about. It's just not something that we really have to think about for most applications. Compare that to the extreme data efficiency that lead to the millennium bug due to cutting two bytes!
Another really interesting find for me was Richard talking about a "Data sharing pattern catalogue" project at IF. It seemed like a really obvious thing when he mentioned it. Looking at the work they share I think it's brilliant, to help teams that may not be used to approaches for sharing data to give them pointers of good patterns to follow. And it's open to outside contributors, so has the potential to be a really useful living body of knowledge.
All-in-all a good night learning about what others are up to.
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