Vision

Our vision is a world where every individual and organization is safe and confident about how decisions are made by the autonomous systems.

How is this vision achieved?

By applying the same format and data structure to disclose the high-level design, ethical approaches, and capabilities of all digital (IT) products in the world, making it easier to compare and assess risks.

By organizing the offerings of digital products explicitly and concretely, classified by features. In this way, it becomes easier to know the privacy, cybersecurity, bias, influence, and other risk/value features contributing to the ethical ‘vector’ of the digital product.

By indicating the level of importance digital products assign to the ethical features it supports.

By providing means to publish ethics vector information in an open format that is easy to access for humans and machines.

By making the ethical disclosure accessible to everyone, in a standardized form at any time, for consultation or to be reused for integration purposes.

By displaying the visual labels reflecting the data and decision-making practices of the digital products to citizens, so that they can easily understand the risks they are facing without having to dig into legal jargon.

By improving the capacity for cooperation and dialogue between digital product owners, regulators, social agents, and citizens.

By allowing the interconnection of ethical disclosure with other product information.

By providing an open protocol (a mechanism) to read, write, and update ethical disclosure.

Our commitment

In this journey, Open Ethics contributors are committing to the design principles and essential requirements to enable a ‘plug and play’ transparency. This requires specifically:

  1. A common taxonomy and definition of Open Ethics Components – the boundaries, data schemas, APIs, functional and non-functional capabilities, based on stable software components and middleware;
  2. Open Ethics Transparency Protocol reference implementations, via Open APIs.
  3. Building a strong community of experts, policy-makers, ambassadors, responsible business owners.