Part of the Process

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...

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...

T his week I was at the Travel Technology Initiative's Summer Forum . The subject was the new EU (and UK!) data protection laws. These are due to come into force in May 2018. It's a large topic where the individual member state's laws and guidance are evolving. There were three main points that I picked up from the presentations. First from Dai Davis , GDPR expert at Percy Crow Davis & Co. His lively presentation talked about how a large part of the change is in how rights communicated. Before this was by "fairness" through registration of usage with a central body. The shift is to transparency by informing individuals directly. This means that the consumer mindset could then shift to match how legislation is framed. For example, with the repetition of many companies holding personally identifiable information now having to inform what they are collecting and how they are processing it. Currently, awareness isn't high and the compensation not high eno...