I thought it was about time I gave you an update on the progress we’ve made in forming an international collaboration of projects that seek to provide ethical information to consumers.
As well as publishing a series of podcast interviews with many of the projects, we’ve been organising online teleconferences almost every week. In December, we organised a couple of general conferences to allow everybody to get to know one another. These were very successful and gave us an idea of the topics we needed to discuss. In the New Year, we’ve so far run two conferences, both addressing specific topics.
The first of these conferences dealt with data collection, representation, summarisation and presentation. It uncovered many of the fundamental issues that we all face in implementing these systems, and led to useful discussion of different approaches. Some were in favour of a very quantitative, algorithmic approach whilst others considered that only qualitative analysis can do justice to the complex issues under examination. The key issues of transparency and trust in relation to data sources was also discussed.
The second conference (video) looked at how we could make our projects financially sustainable. A commercialisation consultant, Gbenga Kogbe, kindly gave us an overview of the main options for generating revenue around a free product. It seems that there are a plethora of opportunities that will arise when an ethical information system becomes successful, but nevertheless we need to focus on developing a convincing business case in order to convince funders and existing businesses to get on board.
The next conferences will focus on involving the academic members of our community and keeping up the momentum we’ve developed in the early conferences. This collaboration seems to be off to a promising start, but there is still a long and winding road ahead!
Recordings and transcripts of previous conferences, dates of upcoming conferences and other related information can be found on the conference information page.