Paper short abstract:

Locating responsibility for the 'goodness' of a digital service is challenging. In many high-impact contexts, responsibility for outcomes rests with some form of professional. These professionals are governed by associations, whose relationship to ‘digital goods’ are the focus of this paper.

Paper long abstract:

Our paper explores how professional governance associations function as fora through which professionals (e.g., doctors, lawyers, public planners) narrate and contest situated notions of ‘the good’, including in relation to digital practices (cf. Nissenbaum 2009). We first describe how professional associations have recently tended to engage digital governance issues as matters of efficiency and/or as potential sources of liability to be managed (Greenleaf 2017). We argue that these associations might draw on their existing forms of leverage (e.g. professional certification, continuing education requirements, disciplinary authorities) and governance logics (e.g. conflict of interest, duties of care) to not only negotiate but to enact collective articulations of context-specific ‘digital good’.

What makes professional associations a potentially generative site for locating the ‘digital good’ are their participatory, situated, and adaptive characteristics. Recent moves to integrate non-professionals (e.g. patients, clients, citizens) into professional governance processes indicate increasing interest in addressing structural inequities through centering the voices of those ‘living closest to the problems’ (e.g. Liao & Ma 2019). However, professional governance bodies are in no way immune to capture by powerful actors in digital political economies. Within these contexts, we describe how data governance, IT vendor management, and automation are flexibly interpreted and narrated with respect to shared professional values, norms, and interests (cf. Latour 1984). We offer our own experiences developing a cross-disciplinary training program for professional students to support their principled and strategic engagement with their respective professional governance bodies towards the realization of context-specific ‘digital goods’ (cf. McDonald & Gansky 2023).