I wrote a long weeknotes last week so I won’t feel bad about a short one this time (the point of weeknotes is the discipline of regularity, not making them as long as possible).
Highlights this week have included:
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Chatting with Rachel and Alison at Research ICT Africa about the work we’re planning to do together, and reading over the draft of a blog by one of their research fellows, Thuli, about the need for an African lens on data and AI ethics and governance. I was struck by how some benefits and harms may be the same as those experienced in the Global North; some of the same harms may be experienced differently; and there are some simple blind spots that we in the Global North will have simply because of the assumptions we have arising from our context.
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The Ada Lovelace Institute roundtable on public attitudes to data, which was really interesting. I’m looking forward to their write-up.
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Working on a bit of wording for the piece with Jess and Ben at the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science on patient attitudes to the use of health data, which meant exploring themes around the purpose of these exercises; trust and trustworthiness; levels and methods of participation; and aspects of effectiveness and legitimacy. My new favourite paper on the latter is Conceptualizing Legitimacy: Input, Output, and Throughput by Vivien Schmidt.
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Lots of interviews for the five remaining candidates for the Advocacy and campaign director role. It’s going to be a really hard decision between them.
I’m going on leave for a couple of weeks now – interrupted by the Bennett Institute for Public Policy event: Lessons from history for governing the digital future on Tuesday, where I’m very much looking forward to talking about the themes that are coming out of my work comparing the regulation of food to the regulation of data. So there will be an interruption in weeknotes as I spend time with my family, playing board games, walking in the countryside, pretending to be a mole, getting a tour of Bath from Leigh, and hopefully escaping from a couple of rooms.