Paper short abstract:

This paper present insights from one of IsITethical? Experiments, the EtiKit, a travelling pop-up digital-physical exercise designed to trigger temporal participatory spaces to support ethical conversations.

Paper long abstract:

Responses in Disaster and Risk Management (DRM) are changing from 'authoritative' and public forms of command and control to 'datafied' and net-centric approaches. This promises new ways to conduct predictive analysis, more agile response capacity and coordination of time-critical, multi-agency operations, as well as, more targeted communications with the public, opening formally, and informally, more opportunities for participation. Simultaneously, innovation in the DRM also involves surveillance of people, assets, and environments as well as a sense of distributed responsibilities.

Ethical tensions arise between human rights and the drive to innovate for better public preparedness. Currently, research and innovation is struggling to address these tensions proactively, in part because knowledge is fragmented through sectors, cultures, countries and throughout a diversity of legal and technical bases, and in part because the challenges are formidable. Responses to these tensions often focus on a particular technology or domain as if it were separate from contexts of design, management, policy, culture and use, rather than acknowledge the interconnected organizational complexities enfolded into in each stage

IsITethical?Exchange is an initiative of a group of scholars in collaboration with Public Safety Communications Europe Network, to build community of practitioners, researchers, commercial developers and policy-makers in the DRM. It experiments with collaborative and creative methods to catalyse a participatory approach to ethical assessment as ongoing process, rather than a policing document.

This paper present insights from one of IsITethical? Experiments, the EtiKit, a travelling pop-up digital-physical exercise designed to trigger temporal participatory spaces to support ethical conversations.