As the year 2023 begins, it is time we provide an update on the work done by the Witty Works ethics board in the last year: How we organized ourselves, defined our processes and implemented them in practice. Especially how we deal with situations that are not as clear as "right" or "wrong".
How to operationalize an ethics board
After the announcement of the Witty Works ethics board the first task was to define our roles & accountabilities, processes and most importantly principles. As mentioned in our announcement, there are unfortunately few tech companies, let alone startups, that have ethics boards or provide insights into how their ethics boards work. Thankfully, with our experienced ethics board members we did find some points to start from, largely from the public sector. We adapted these to the needs of a private sector startup. You can find more on this in this blog post.
Defining Roles & Accountabilities
Witty Works facilitates the ethics board meetings
using the Holacracy framework which ensures a smooth
flow of information and decisions between all
parties. We're using
Holaspirit
to detail roles, purpose, and accountabilities, and
proactively informing the board of developments and
relaying information back to stakeholders.
Additionally, we have created a dedicated role for
answering questions about our algorithms and
established a rule for transparency to the
public.
Our external board members have
taken on the responsibility of making Witty Works
aware of ethical concerns and working on solutions,
with Anna and Leila focusing on technology ethics,
Fungai focusing on DEI, and Leila focusing
also on ESG and UNSDGs.
Participation
in the monthly meetings and work between meetings is
now paid by the hour or with a matching donation to
a charity of the choice of the ethics board member.
Getting to work
We've established a process for triaging concerns raised by internal or external stakeholders and defined our data ethics principles. This will be shared in a forthcoming blog post. Thanks to this process, we've tackled the first concrete concerns, including improving transparency in data collection (see below for more details), how we support ESG/UNSDG goals, and making Witty more accessible (with work done on font sizes and color, more to come).
New Feature: Consent during Onboarding
During the sign-up, it wasn't obvious to users what type of data collection Witty will be doing on their data.
We adapted the onboarding to add a dedicated consent page that summarizes relevant information and links to a newly created trust & security page. While this makes the onboarding process more lengthy, we decided to take this step to provide for informed decision-making.
New Feature: Analytics
We identified a potential privacy issue with our
personal and team analytics feature. The main
concern with analytics was that we want to build a
trust relationship with individuals. As such we
intentionally do not want to expose individual
analytics to team admins.
To maintain
customer trust, we allow individuals to opt out of
team analytics. Furthermore, team admins can only
analyze aggregated data to prevent surveillance of
individuals. Finally, team admins can expose the
team analytics to the entire team for transparency.
With this approach, we strike a balance between
reducing bias in language by making customers aware
of non-inclusive language while protecting privacy
by not monitoring individual behavior.
New Feature: Custom machine learning model
We're improving our custom machine learning model to
reduce false positives using data from customers who
accept or reject suggestions. Customers here refers
to both freemium and paid. That being said, paying
customers can also disable data collection in team
settings. As a first step, we protect privacy by
stripping numbers, emails, and URLs from the
collected data and store it independ of PII like the
customers name or email. In a second step we
manually review collected sentences to avoid
bias.
We're committed to providing a
credible real-world benefit in the field of DEI. For
more details, see our
trust & security
page.
A look ahead into 2023
We plan to establish a "language council" to
safeguard that all diversity dimensions are
considered in our vocabulary. This council
will
provide that all diversity dimensions are considered
in our vocabulary. We will draw upon our
growing partnerships
with NGOs and diversity subject-matter experts to
form this council. This new approach will not only
help identify potential opposing interests between
different diversity dimensions, such as neologism
versus reading clarity, but also within a specific
diversity dimension, such as cultural differences or
opposing approaches like identifying first versus
person first.
We are also thrilled to
announce that Leila has agreed to use her expertise
in ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) and
UNSDG (United Nations Sustainable Development Group)
to help us create a sustainable organization,
product, and go-to-market strategy that benefits
society and the planet. This is an exciting
development for Witty, as we strive to make a
positive impact on the world through our work.
Sadly,
we have to announce that Fungai has stepped down
from her role due to time constraints. We would like
to express our gratitude to Fungai for her
contributions to the board. Her work and dedication
have been instrumental in shaping our processes and
laying the foundation for our ethics protocols. We
wish her all the best in her future endeavors.
The
Witty Works ethics board continues to provide a
critical outside perspective and know how to Witty
Works. We are thankful for the work so that Witty
continues to be a trustworthy solution for
diversity, equity and inclusion.
