September 7, 2018

Ethical Data Sharing Values & Principles

This dashboard project represents a new level of data access and transparency for people interested in learning about homelessness. As such, the developers of the dashboard and users accessing this information should be operating under an ethical framework to promote the maximum benefit to consumers and the homelessness system overall. This document outlines the values and principles used to guide the creation of the interactive dashboard, as well as the values and principles expected of any end user using the data for their consumption and distribution needs. These values and principles have been adapted from the data science community’s Community Principles on Ethical Data Practices.

Community Users

This document is meant to provide a framework to guide your experience and data collection activities when using the statewide data dashboards. This is a living document and will be updated on an as-needed basis.

Community User Values

  • Openness: Practice humility and openness. Transparent practices, community engagement, and responsible communications are an integral part of data ethics
  • Benefit: Set people before data and be responsible for maximizing social benefit and minimizing harm
  • Fairness: Understand, mitigate, and communicate the presence of bias in both data practice and consumption
  • Reliability: Ensure every effort is made to have a complete understanding of what is contained within the data, where it came from and how it was created

Community User Principles

By viewing these data, you agree to…

  1. Take great care to communicate responsibly; acknowledge and disclose caveats and limitations, provide opportunities for feedback, and minimize any potential harm.
  2. Respect needs of other stakeholders as it relates to privacy and data ownership: this includes not using another organizations data in an effort to make your own organization appear to be a better performer.
  3. Practice responsible transparency including providing enough context and documentation of data collected to allow other trained practitioners to reproduce results.
  4. Make efforts to guarantee the security of data to prevent unauthorized access, privacy violations, tampering, or any other harm.
  5. Make efforts to protect the anonymity of consumers contained in the data sets—especially when drilling down to granular detail in the dashboard
  6. Foster diversity by welcoming an inclusive range of viewpoints on the data, including the viewpoints of marginalized groups and those with lived experience.
  7. Acknowledge and mitigate bias in data collection efforts as well as data reporting efforts.
  8. Ensure responsibility in exercising ethical imagination in using data, actively working to increase benefit and prevent harm to others.
  9. Exercise accountability in data use and report violations of the values and principles that guide this work.

Dashboard Developer Values

  • Accountability: Worth ethically and transparently, fixing errors as quickly as possible, holding ourselves and others accountable
  • Inclusion: Maximize collaboration, accessibility, connectivity, diversity, and outputs
  • Experimentation: Continuously encourage iterative testing and analysis of results for accuracy and further functionality
  • Impact: Allow for the measurement of well-defined goals in a design that is understandable and can provide substantive outcomes for providers about the performance of their projects

Dashboard Development Principles

As data teams we aim to:

  1. Use data as a tool for improving the lives of our consumers
  2. Clearly identify the questions and objectives that drive the performance indicators on the dashboard to guide further development and refinement
  3. Be open to changing methods and conclusions in response to new knowledge
  4. Present our work in ways that empower others to make better informed, data-driven decisions
  5. Prioritize data collection and data quality as a first step in helping improve accuracy of all dashboard projects
  6. Create reproducible and extensible work
  7. Recognize and mitigate bias in ourselves and the data we use
  8. Carefully consider ethical implications of the choices we make when selecting data for inclusion or exclusion
  9. Respect and invite fair criticism while promoting the identification and open discussion of errors, risks, and unintended consequences of our work
  10. Protect the privacy and security of the people represented in our data
  11. Help others learn the most useful and appropriate applications of the data in the dashboard