The ambition of the VIRT-EU project was to set the groundwork for a more ethical European ICT innovation environment by employing state-of-the-art interdisciplinary Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) and Computer Science (ICT) empirical research in combination with legal scholarship and design research. By studying how developers, individual designers and start-ups in the Internet of Things (IoT) field discuss and share knowledge, we explored how ideas and ethical values develop and travel in Europe and beyond.
The VIRT-EU project partners achieved the following four objectives:
• To empirically identify how local culture and network society influence the understanding and movement of particular social values among technology developers. This includes how local differences and networked commonalities can influence the development of ethical subjects using data mining, social network analysis, qualitative inquiry, and design methods.
• To develop a Privacy, Ethical and Social Impact Assessment (PESIA) framework shaped by state of the art legal research and empirical data, to enable developers and other societal stakeholders to reflect upon, evaluate and take into account not only the data protection, security and privacy aspects of new technologies but also the ethical and social concerns embedded within that challenge autonomy and freedom.
• To systematically consider and implement the PESIA framework as part of co-designing a set of self-assessment tools with technology developers, who may not be able to anticipate the future use of their projects an their clients and partners, founded in existing developer practices and based on quantitative, case study and design research that identifies how ethics operate as a process.
• To leverage expert civil society partners to engage SMEs, makers, advocates and other stakeholders in the implementation of co-designed tools and processes working towards alignment with the changing European data protection landscape in order to build collective and social resilience in an age of individual subjectivity.