Why did Witty Works decide it needed a technology
ethics board? How was the board created, its members
selected? What can we expect to see from the board
and more importantly how will it help foster
Witty’s mission
of an inclusive and equitable society?
I
have interviewed Lukas Kahwe Smith, co-founder and
CTO, who is the internal champion for the ethics
board.
Why did Witty Works think an ethics board was
needed?
The topic of diversity, equity and inclusion
requires credibility. We have to make an effort to
build trust. In our work on Witty Works products,
we're frequently faced with ethical questions and
dilemmas, such as how to approach inclusive language
or how we build for accessibility. We believe that
outside experts are critical to ensure we have the
right expertise to handle such questions but more
importantly that we are held accountable to deliver
on our mission in an ethical manner.
What is the Technology Ethics Board responsible
for?
While we initially set out to create an “AI
ethics board”, while setting up the governance we
decided to broaden the scope to cover “technology”
in general. We use a role based governance system
called
holacracy
at Witty Works, where each role has a clearly
defined purpose and accountabilities.
- Name: Technology Ethics Board
- Purpose: The purpose of the Tech Ethic Board is to provide Witty Works with expert guidance to innovate responsibly.
- Accountabilities: Reviewing ongoing developments and product roadmap for potential ethical issues Advising on how to handle ethical issues Publishing relevant information about the ethical board processes and decisions
When researching how other startups have set up their ethics boards, we didn't find any good examples or templates for startups. So from the very beginning we decided that we wanted to both establish a technology ethics board for Witty Works and share our approach, learnings and templates with other startups.
We built a list of over a dozen experts in technology ethics and DEI. After two months of interviews and consultations, we selected three experts that bring the required expertise and can help us build out and operationalize ethics practice at Witty Works.
The members of the Technology Ethics Board include:
- Anna Mätzener - Managing Director of AlgorithmWatch Switzerland, Digital Shaper 2021
- Fungai Mettler - ESG & Social Impact Leader, 50 Young African Women Achievers 2020, Woman Investor of the Year 2022
- Leila Toplic - Technology Ethics & Social Impact Leader, 100 Brilliant Women in Ethics 2021
- Elena Nazarenko - Senior NLP Expert
- Lukas Kahwe Smith - Co-Founder and CTO
What advice do you have for other startups when
it comes to innovating responsibly?
Start early with tackling hard ethical
issues. Don’t allow the questions to pile up, and
suddenly you realize the company you build to
advance humanity is actively harmful. We just
established our ethics board, so our understanding
will evolve a lot over the coming months. We are
happy to talk to any startup about our learnings and
share our processes and templates.
—
You
can find out more about each of our external board
members on the
technology ethics board page. Here we will also share all the key information
detailing our processes and links to our quarterly
updates.
