Data Ethics Canvas

• Values: { privacy fairness explainability accountability }
• Categories: { model-agnostic }
• Stage: { design phase in-processing post-processing }
• References:
  • Data Ethics Canvas
  • Practical guide for usage
  • Whitepaper: ODI Ethical Data Handling 2017-09-13
  • Blog: Why we need the data ethics canvas

The Data Ethics Canvas is a tool developed by the Open Data Institute for providing ethical guidance to organizations doing any type of project involving data. That includes data collection, sharing, and its usage for example in machine learning applications. The tool is accompanied with a white paper and a brief practical guide for its usage.

Page 3 of the practical guide lists some recommendations that are also relevant when you do not use this tool.

• Share your notes and action points with as many stakeholders as possible
• Review progress made towards your action
• Monitor ongoing impact of your project
• Review and update answers on the filled-in canvas, e.g. in a quarterly review.
• Involve the canvas in a retrospective at the end of the project to inform future work as well

The practical guide mentions this “trace” with respect to the origins of the tool:

The Data Ethics Canvas is based on the Ethics Canvas, a higher-level framework for assessing the ethical implications of any project, developed by the ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology. The ADAPT Centre’s Ethics Canvas is itself based on the original Business Model Canvas by Alex Osterwalder. (1)