Part of the Process

Photo by  Andres Urena  on  Unsplash This week I'm going to reflect on a year and bit of using two voice assistants - Alexa and Siri. Although much the same would apply to Google Home. I must start by saying I love Alexa and the echo dot. She does just enough and is unobtrusive enough in my life that I'm not a slave to her ... in the same way as a smartphone. Last month I wrote about one aspect that "we" have not looked into enough - privacy.  “I think it will make for a perfect alarm clock”  Trusted Reviews - Amazon Echo Spot Here it looks like part of the problem with technology is the uncritical approach of what could go wrong, in building and selling. There is no mention of privacy concerns apart from throw away comment about a "mute" feature. As well as the obvious issue of an internet connect camera in our bedrooms. I have been thinking about other issues related to a mindset used to personal in more common use areas. So I have done some di...

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 eth...

As part of my continuing professional development I have taken two courses. They are similar in terms of backer and effort required. Hopefuly they will help me to prepare for 2018! The first is an intro to Ethics and Law related to analytics and AI applications. This provided by Microsoft on the edX platform. This followed a common format of: a short video,  linked content to read,  labs to explore the subject, and finally  quizzes to check progress.  The content was still fresh with the course first run in April 2017. This meant it was topical with GDPR law as well as FCC rulings in the USA. If you are in IT and interested in Ethics, then I can recommend learning from an ethicist. There is no real need to come up with your own moral framework, since there is over 2000 years of open research. Having the two experts from different domains present their viewpoints and way of working was a nice escape from the technologist bubble. The second was actually a ...

Photo by  Annie Spratt  on  Unsplash I never used to see the point of "end of year round up" blog posts. But the journey that I've been on during the past year has lead me to reflect on what I have learned. The beginning of the year started off with me thinking about being data informed . This was balanced by a survey that showed this work had paid off . Since then I have put in processing to help collect and report on what we guided us to detect changes. Learning R and creating a repo to share the data processing recipes  has been the culmination of this. Data isn't just an important topic for product management, combined with ethics it's a topic that is increasingly touching our lives. My interest was first piqued in my reading during April .  Later in the year as GDPR started to loom on the horizon I took a course on Ethics and Law in Data and Analytics . This was a great course that covered not only some philosophical exploration of what it m...