Jekyll2023-06-22T07:40:47+00:00https://responsibletech.work/index.xmlResponsibleTech.WorkPractical tools for more responsible product development in the tech industry.Announcing the Responsible AI Pledge Challenge2023-06-20T08:00:00+00:002023-06-20T08:00:00+00:00https://responsibletech.work/blog/2023/6/20/announcing-the-responsible-ai-pledge-challenge<p>Generative AI is taking the world by storm and has also taken over our discussions of ResponsibleTech.Work. Like many others, we’ve spent the past couple of months learning, exchanging resources, and trying to figure out what it all means for responsible product development. As a worrying trend, Big Tech companies started laying off their responsible AI teams just as they started rushing to bring their GPT-powered products to market.</p>
<p>The same men who have been funding and developing this new wave of technology, are now arguing in the public forum about just how fast we should unleash the <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/artificial-intelligence-shoggoth-fears_uk_64789526e4b045ce2486feff">shoggoth</a>, and shifting the debate from the <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/06/12/1074449/real-ai-risks/">already well-documented harms</a>. As we listen to billionaires and “grandfathers of AI” trying to decide our future, it’s easy to feel powerless over how AI is being developed and deployed.</p>
<p>But LLMs – Large Language Models – powering ChatGPT, Bard & co. were all trained on our data, our thoughts. And we started ResponsibleTech.Work in the belief that <strong>all of us, regardless of role or influence, can take personal responsibility and contribute to more responsible tech</strong>.</p>
<p>This is why we’d like to invite everyone – especially tech workers – to <strong>join the Responsible AI Pledge Challenge</strong> by writing personal and concrete pledges on how each of us will contribute to a more responsible AI future. The challenge is based on <a href="https://responsibletech.work/blog/2022/3/1/pledge-works-writing-pledges-for-better-outcomes/">Pledge Works</a>, our open-source tool that aims to embed responsibility in everyday product decisions. While we encourage you to get familiar with Pledge Works, <strong>there are no prerequisites</strong> to join the Responsible AI Pledge Challenge.</p>
<p>The main goal of the challenge – more on that later – is to <strong>invite more people to contribute to the public discussion on responsible AI</strong> by writing and sharing diverse pledges. We have prepared a suggested challenge flow, but feel free to join the challenge and come up with pledges in your own way.</p>
<h2 id="suggested-responsible-ai-pledge-challenge-flow"><strong>Suggested Responsible AI Pledge Challenge flow</strong></h2>
<figure>
<a href="/assets/img/blog/RTW-Responsible_AI_Pledge_Challenge.png" target="_blank" alt="Open image in new window" style="cursor: zoom-in;">
<img src="/assets/img/blog/RTW-Responsible_AI_Pledge_Challenge.png" alt="Diagram of the Responsible AI Pledge Challenge iterative cycle. The stages are: 1 Choose a pledge period: Set a timeframe to meet your Responsible Al pledges. 2 Explore your context: What is your position on Al and what are you missing? 3 Pledge, share & challenge: How can I contribute to the Responsible Al debate? 4 Follow your pledges: Pin your pledges as you try to honour your commitment. 5 Pledge checkpoint: Review & share your pledge progress and decide on next steps." />
</a>
</figure>
<p>These are the steps you might want to take when joining the challenge:</p>
<h3 id="1-choose-a-pledge-period">1. Choose a pledge period</h3>
<p>We suggest starting by choosing a timeframe to meet your Responsible AI pledges. Having a concrete start and end time will <strong>help you make your pledges specific</strong> and avoid setting commitments that are too general or unreachable. A period between one and three months can be a good starting point. We recommend adding the end date to your task manager or calendar app to be reminded of the day when your pledge period ends so that you can <strong>set some time aside for your pledge checkpoint review</strong>.</p>
<h3 id="2-explore-your-context">2. Explore your context</h3>
<p>The next step is to think about <strong>your current position on AI, and define your context window</strong>, which includes your values, principles, and life situation. Here are some guiding questions for you to consider:</p>
<ul>
<li>What worries you when you think about AI?</li>
<li>Which aspects of AI do you wish you knew more about?</li>
<li>Who can you talk to better understand AI?</li>
<li>What are your current skills?</li>
<li>What kind of impact can you have?</li>
<li>What might be going on in your life during the pledge period that might impact your ability to follow your pledges?</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="3-pledge-share--challenge">3. Pledge, share & challenge</h3>
<p>Now it’s time to make a commitment! Open your text editor or camera app, and write or record one or more concrete pledges on what you, personally, will do to contribute to the responsible AI discussion in the chosen period given your context. Pick <strong>realistic commitments that fit your selected pledge period and your context window</strong>. If you don’t know where to start, look at pledges other people have written or start with a <a href="https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/ethics-guidelines-trustworthy-ai">set of general guidelines</a> and think about where you have the power to contribute.</p>
<p>To keep yourself accountable, <strong>we suggest sharing your pledges and inviting others to participate</strong>. You can publish your Responsible AI Pledges on your blog or social media platforms under the hashtag <strong>#ResponsibleAIPledges</strong>, or share them on your team’s Slack. If you don’t feel comfortable or safe sharing your pledges publicly, you can share them privately or write them on a piece of paper that you hang in a shared space. When sharing your pledges, you can also expose your pledge context.</p>
<h3 id="4-follow-your-pledges">4. Follow your pledges</h3>
<p>Next comes the time to try to honour the commitment(s) you’ve made to yourself or others within the chosen pledge period. To remind yourself of the pledges you’ve made, we recommend you <strong>pin your pledges somewhere you can easily revisit them daily</strong>, either in physical or digital form.</p>
<h3 id="5-pledge-checkpoint">5. Pledge checkpoint</h3>
<p>And finally, once your pledge period ends, it’s time to <strong>review your progress and decide how you want to continue</strong>. During the review, check whether you’ve managed to fulfil your pledges entirely or partially, and think about how you might write better pledges or choose a different pledge period in the future. You can do the pledge review alone or with friends, so you can offer additional feedback to each other.</p>
<hr />
<p>Obviously, <strong>you can keep this process going for as long as you want</strong>. If you enjoyed the challenge, keep going! In the following pledge cycle(s), you can experiment with different levels of granularity – make your pledges more concrete or abstract –, pledge formats, and durations of the pledge period.</p>
<p>And again, <strong>the flow outlined above is just a suggestion</strong>. You are welcome to skip steps or mix it up – especially as you get more comfortable with the process. As long as you are able to come up with personally relatable pledges and discover ways to embed them in your daily practice, you are meeting the spirit of <a href="https://responsibletech.work/tools/development/pledge-works/">Pledge Works</a> and the pledge challenge.</p>
<h2 id="joining-the-challenge-as-a-product-team"><strong>Joining the challenge as a product team</strong></h2>
<p>You can also join the Responsible AI Pledge Challenge as a team, or even organize a community pledge-writing session with your peers. When you write pledges together with others, you can <strong>explore differences in values and attitudes and develop shared meaning through the collaborative process</strong>.</p>
<p>In a product team, you can focus on different perspectives, such as the team’s use of AI tools like Copilot, or examine your planned integration of AI-powered APIs. Making pledges to learn together can also be a valuable team commitment.</p>
<p>Here’s a revisited challenge flow for product teams:</p>
<figure>
<a href="/assets/img//blog/RTW-Responsible_AI_Pledge_Challenge-teams.png" target="_blank" alt="Open image in new window" style="cursor: zoom-in;">
<img src="/assets/img//blog/RTW-Responsible_AI_Pledge_Challenge-teams.png" alt="Diagram of the Responsible AI Pledge Challenge iterative cycle for product teams. The stages of the cycle are: 1 Choose a pledge period: Set a sprint or epic to support with Responsible Al pledges. 2 Explore your context: What is our position on Al and what are we missing? 3 Write team pledges: How can we use A more responsibly in our practice? 4 Seek better outcomes: Use pledges to establish a more responsible Al practice. 5 Review outcomes together: Examine the consequences and decide on next steps." />
</a>
</figure>
<h2 id="the-goal-of-the-challenge"><strong>The goal of the Challenge</strong></h2>
<p>The goal of the challenge is to <strong>encourage each and every one of us to think about the impact we can have on responsible AI</strong>, whether that’s in product development, education, political action, or just by joining the conversation with our unique perspectives.</p>
<p>Obviously, the pledges of a deep learning expert at OpenAI will be different from those a freelance designer or an ethics researcher might write. The goal is not to compete on who can write the most ambitious and impressive-sounding pledges, but <strong>collectively brainstorm how each of us might contribute to more responsible AI</strong>.</p>
<p>The goal of the challenge also isn’t to let individuals and organizations who hold more power off the hook and abdicate responsibility, but instead to <strong>make the discussion more inclusive</strong>. And who knows, maybe we can even help future GPTs learn something useful about how we view responsibility in the process!</p>
<h2 id="responsibleaipledges-examples"><strong>#ResponsibleAIPledges examples</strong></h2>
<p>To help you think about your pledges, we’re also including a couple of example pledges from our core team:</p>
<div class="example">
<ul>
<li><em>“I pledge to explore different mediums and channels to help more people understand the biases and limitations of tools like ChatGPT and improve their AI literacy.”</em></li>
<li><em>“I pledge to be transparent about how and when I use AI tools.”</em></li>
</ul>
<p>By <a href="https://blog.ialja.com/2023/06/20/responsible-ai-needs-responsible-humans/">Alja Isaković</a></p>
</div>
<div class="example">
<ul>
<li><em>“To compensate for the water use of my chats with ChatGPT, I pledge to use grey water for my plants.”</em></li>
</ul>
<p>By <a href="https://www.the-public-good.com/ai/pledges">Daniel Hartley</a></p>
</div>
<p>As you can see, we took a different approach to writing and framing our pledges, context window, and recent thinking about AI, and we encourage you to do the same. <strong>Have fun, experiment, and make <em>your</em> pledges your own.</strong></p>
<p>In the coming months, we’d like to feature additional <strong>#ResponsibleAIPledges</strong> from diverse perspectives. If you’d like your pledges to be featured on our website, email <a href="mailto:info@ResponsibleTech.Work">info@ResponsibleTech.Work</a> with your link.</p>ResponsibleTech.Work teamWe don't think billionaires and "grandfathers of AI" should be the only ones that get to define what responsible AI means. This is why we want to challenge more people – like you – to contribute to the public discussion on responsible AI by writing and sharing our diverse pledges.Pledge Works: Writing Pledges for Better Outcomes2022-03-01T10:21:00+00:002022-03-01T10:21:00+00:00https://responsibletech.work/blog/2022/3/1/pledge-works-writing-pledges-for-better-outcomes<p>There is a growing responsibility gap in the tech industry. Increasingly, tech workers are realizing moving fast and breaking things causes problems down the road. We want to work for companies that are a force for good in the world. While most tech companies profess values and principles that have us nodding in agreement, we’re collectively discovering it’s not always easy to apply the <em>“Don’t be evil”</em> principle in practice, especially when you’re under stress and there is pressure to meet deadlines amidst conflicting expectations.</p>
<p>Part of the problem is that values and principles often end up collecting dust as posters plastered around the office, while the everyday product decisions we make under pressure lead to actions that diverge from our good intentions and professed principles. Even <del>Facebook</del> Meta lists <em>“Keep People Safe and Protect Privacy”</em> among their key principles, and we’re all seeing how well that holds up under scrutiny.</p>
<h2 id="introducing-pledge-works">Introducing Pledge Works</h2>
<p>At ResponsibleTech.Work, <strong>we challenge product teams to discover</strong> <strong>how to act responsibly in their everyday product decisions</strong> with <a href="/tools/development/pledge-works/">Pledge Works</a>.</p>
<p>Pledge Works is a catalyst for responsible design and development. The core idea is simple: Pledge Works invites you to <strong>write pledges for better outcomes</strong> at every step of your existing processes, in cascading levels of granularity.</p>
<figure>
<a href="/tools/development/pledge-works/">
<img src="/assets/img//tools/Pledge_Works-formula.webp" alt="Pledge Works formula: values + context = pledges. Values are drawn as a blue circle, context as a black square, and they combine into a purple square within circle to illustrate the Pledge Works approach." />
</a>
</figure>
<p>By writing pledges, you are <strong>making promises</strong> – commitments to yourself, your team, your customers, various stakeholders, and the planet – <strong>to seek better outcomes in context</strong>. Writing pledges as a team invites discussion as to whether your work reflects your core principles and values.</p>
<p>Pledges always match your scope of work. Pledges cascade from high-level company pledges to low-level pledges that target specific pieces of work, making it easy to <strong>keep track of what responsibility looks like at every level</strong>.</p>
<p>This is what it might look like in practice. As a team, you select this high-level pledge for your project: <em>“We pledge to respect people we build products for and treat them as friends, not users.”</em> When you break down your project into what needs to be implemented, you derive a more specific pledge and add it to your product backlog: “<em>As a responsible team, we pledge to use simple and inclusive language in the UI because we want to make our tool accessible to non-native English speakers and easy to adopt in diverse teams.</em>”</p>
<p>Unlike principles and values, <strong>pledges need to be visible and at hand to inform your work</strong>. On the implementation level, pledges become fully-fledged members of your backlog. Anyone on the team can challenge feature requests that break pledges the team has agreed upon – or celebrate features that uphold pledges.</p>
<h2 id="explore-pledge-works">Explore Pledge Works</h2>
<p>To learn more about the building blocks of Pledge Works, including pledge types and formulas with examples, pledge checklists, and sources of pledges, visit the <a href="/tools/development/pledge-works/">Pledge Works listing</a> in our Tools directory. We also provide examples of <a href="/tools/development/pledge-works/#pledge-works-in-practice">how to implement Pledge Works in practice</a>, regardless of which development process you might be using.</p>
<figure>
<a href="/tools/development/pledge-works/">
<img src="/assets/img//tools/Pledge_Works-process.webp" alt="A graphic showing elements of the Pledge Works process. The process is described in detail in the attached link." />
</a>
</figure>
<p>We developed Pledge Works to match our <a href="/about/#tools">requirements for tools</a>: it fits into existing processes, different stages of product development, can grow with your team, and invites you to have ethical discussions. You don’t have to use all the building blocks and <strong>we encourage adaptations and experimentation</strong>.</p>
<p>And if you want to dig deeper and experiment visually, there’s also <a href="/tools/business/pledge-toolbox/">Pledge Toolbox</a>, a set of tools to help you write and examine your pledges from a broader ethical perspective.</p>
<figure>
<a href="/tools/business/pledge-toolbox/">
<img src="/assets/img//tools/Pledge_Toolbox-preview.webp" alt="A graphic showing a small preview of the tools in the Pledge Toolbox, which are described in more detail in the attached link." />
</a>
</figure>
<h2 id="who-is-pledge-works-for">Who is Pledge Works for?</h2>
<p>By developing various types and formulas of pledges, we think Pledge Works could help:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Companies and organizations</strong> that are ready to be held accountable for their actions and want to include their employees in the decision-making process.</li>
<li><strong>Product managers</strong> that want to ensure ethical concerns brought up by their team are not swept under the carpet and who want to bring diverse perspectives to the table.</li>
<li><strong>Developers, designers, and other members of product teams</strong> who see ethical issues with the product they’re working on but don’t feel like they have a say in the process. In other words, any product people who would like to change how things are done in their company but don’t have any real opportunities to influence priorities and high-level principles.</li>
<li><strong>Professions in other roles</strong> within companies and organisations (marketing, legal, HR, etc.) who are finding it hard to advocate for more ethical decision-making.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="looking-for-feedback-on-pledge-works">Looking for feedback on Pledge Works</h2>
<p>We have seen the power of writing down concrete pledges in our own work and developed thought experiments for different contexts, but we want to test Pledge Works more widely in order to see what works and what doesn’t. We don’t want Pledge Works to end up as just another tool in a directory that nobody uses, so we think it’s crucial to validate it in different contexts.</p>
<p><strong>We invite you to try out Pledge Works in your own projects</strong> and let us know how it works for you. You can start small by writing your own pledges and using them as a lens through which you challenge your daily tasks. Or give it a try as a team. You could also share your pledges and invite feedback from your customers or peers. Either way, we hope to hear from you on <a href="https://github.com/ResponsibleTechWork/RespTechWork-website/discussions/">GitHub discussions</a>. We’re happy to have a chat with you and your team on how Pledge Works might work for you.</p>ResponsibleTech.Work teamIntroducing Pledge Works, a practical tool that invites you to write pledges for better outcomes as part of your existing product development processes.Making responsible decisions when developing this website2021-08-10T08:21:00+00:002021-08-10T08:21:00+00:00https://responsibletech.work/blog/2021/8/10/responsible-decisions-when-developing-website<p>The goal of ResponsibleTech.Work is to help all of us make more responsible decisions. When I was developing this website, I found it important to follow responsible principles outlined in the framework and make a number of small decisions to show how websites can be developed more responsibly.</p>
<hr />
<p>In addition to wanting to lead by example, I was motivated by web development practices I noticed while doing research for the framework. On the sustainability side, I found way too many websites that preach about web sustainability on carbon-heavy websites. You know the type, lots of large images, scripts, trackers, pop-ups. And on the other side of the not-so-responsible spectrum, there were the many websites that insisted I should give up my email address to view their supposedly free resources. Why did such practices become commonplace in our industry?</p>
<h2 id="responsible-web-development-decisions-that-should-become-more-common">Responsible web development decisions that should become more common</h2>
<p>Given the nature of the project, I knew that this website needs to be different. These are some of the responsible decisions I made that might be considered non-standard in the industry:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Using a static site generator to build this website</strong>: WordPress might be the most common choice when building a new website, especially for those unfamiliar with web development. Even though this website has a fair amount of content, it is essentially a simple collection of pages, which has no use for a database in the backend. That’s why I chose to build it in <a href="https://jekyllrb.com/">Jekyll</a>, a <a href="https://jamstack.org/generators/">static site generator</a> that does just what it needs to do and creates low-footprint, fast-loading HTML pages. If we ever need to make managing content easier, we can always add something like <a href="https://www.netlifycms.org/">Netlify CMS</a> and still avoid the hassle and waste of having to manage a database.</li>
<li><strong>Choosing a theme that isn’t based on a bulky UI library</strong>: Libraries like Bootstrap made designing websites easier and more accessible but using such libraries usually loads your project with tons of code you’ll never use. Yes, it’s mostly text, and you can do a lot by using minified files. However, way too often, you end up having to override a lot of the CSS from the library you chose, which isn’t efficient and creates waste. That’s why I was happy to find a <a href="https://github.com/stackbit-themes/libris-jekyll">Jekyll theme by Stackbit</a> that doesn’t rely on a bulky third-party library and was easy to modify to fit my idea of how the website should look.</li>
<li><strong>Focus on text, optimize images</strong>: Text is the most sustainable choice for web content. This blog post could easily have a hi-res stock thumbnail image, but it doesn’t – on purpose. While images can add value and make websites easier to process, I intentionally try to avoid using decorative images that don’t make content easier to understand. When images are used, SVG and WebP are the preferred formats to reduce file size. We might eventually add some embedded video content to present the content in a different format, but the focus should remain on text, the most accessible and sustainable media format.</li>
<li><strong>No Google Analytics, no cookies, no tracking</strong>: As exciting as it would be for me to check on the number of page views and visitor countries, I decided not to include any website analytics. No Google Analytics, no Mixpanel, no Hotjar, no Facebook pixel, no other tracking nonsense. This is an open-source educational website, I don’t need to optimize its bounce rate. I don’t need to know where you’re from. I trust that you’ll get in touch if you want to tell us that you found the website useful. Ultimately, hearing direct feedback from a person means so much more than vanity metrics. If I want to know what people think of the website, I’ll be forced to talk to actual people, and that’s a good thing. And hey, I don’t even need to annoy you with cookie warnings because there are none! If you have a good business case for web analytics, please look into more privacy-conscious alternatives like <a href="https://usefathom.com/">Fathom</a>, <a href="https://matomo.org/">Matomo</a>, or others. Google Analytics isn’t the only choice!</li>
<li><strong>Not forcing you to sign up to read content</strong>: My thinking here is that we should aim to make the content so useful you’ll want to tell your friends and coworkers about it and that you’re smart enough to figure out how to <a href="https://responsibletechwork.eo.page/">subscribe to the newsletter</a> or to the RSS feeds (we have one for new <a href="/index.xml">blog posts</a> and another for the <a href="/tools/feed.xml">tools collection</a>) if you want to be notified of new stuff. No annoying pop-ups, no unnecessary data collection, less digital waste.</li>
<li><strong>Limiting the use of social networks</strong>: Similarly, you won’t find a Facebook page or Instagram profile for this project. I don’t think Facebook is doing enough as a company to act responsibly. I did decide to set up a <a href="https://twitter.com/RespTechWork">Twitter account</a> to offer one additional way to get in touch with us, but we have no need for additional profiles, and there are no internal follower goals. Plus, having fewer social profiles to manage means less work for the team and being able to spend more time developing what matters: the content. Our goal here is to educate, not to boost engagement on some third-party service.</li>
<li><strong>Using responsible principles when choosing hosting</strong>: I decided to host the website’s source code on GitHub because of its past support of underrepresented communities – among others, the company has sponsored several free programming workshops for women I organized – and their commitment to <a href="https://socialimpact.github.com">social impact</a>. I also appreciate their <a href="https://github.blog/changelog/2020-10-01-the-default-branch-for-newly-created-repositories-is-now-main/">decision</a> to rename default branches in new repositories as main. Additionally, the company is carbon-neutral, committed to run on 100% renewable energy by 2025, and dedicated to implementing other <a href="https://github.blog/2021-04-22-environmental-sustainability-github/">sustainability practices</a>. Also <a href="https://www.netlify.com/sustainability/">committed to sustainability is Netlify</a>, the service I decided to use to deploy the website.</li>
<li><strong>Using responsible principles when choosing other tools</strong>: MailChimp is often the go-to choice when setting up a newsletter. However, I wanted a service that would allow me to turn off email tracking and is possibly also committed to being more responsible. This is how I found <a href="https://emailoctopus.com/">EmailOctopus</a>. In addition to allowing me to turn off <em>all</em> tracking (yep, I won’t know if you open our newsletter or not because it’s none of my business), the company is committed to <a href="https://emailoctopus.com/doing-good">doing good</a> and building an ethical email marketing community. Upon creating a new account, I was pleasantly surprised to receive an email from the moderation team inquiring about my plan for the list – and I wasn’t able to send out any emails before confirming my good intentions. As a customer, I am actually happy to see that this is a company that adds an extra layer of protection for non-customers before allowing people to send out emails.</li>
</ul>
<p>On their own, the individual choices on this list might not seem like much. Or maybe they sound like too much effort and compromise. In practice, none of these decisions increased development time – if anything, they made my job easier. Not having to test a bunch of various third-party integrations saved time, and optimizing the website will hopefully keep hosting costs lower in addition to being more sustainable. According to the <a href="https://www.websitecarbon.com/">Website Carbon Calculator</a>, <a href="https://www.websitecarbon.com/website/responsibletech-work/">this website is cleaner than 91% of web pages tested</a>, and about 0.10g of CO2 is produced every time somebody visits the website. A good start, although there are always improvements to be made, as I discuss at the end of this post.</p>
<h2 id="why-does-this-matter">Why does this matter?</h2>
<p>I decided to share my thought process because I firmly believe that we can approach web development differently. Just because everyone uses Google Analytics, it doesn’t mean you have to as well – especially if you’re not really using the data for anything other than vanity metrics.</p>
<p>Given the impact our industry has on people and the planet, we need to take responsibility for every piece of code we deploy. Even if it is just a simple education website like this. We have to remind ourselves that just because something is digital, it doesn’t mean it’s clean, green, and better for people.</p>
<p>I’m under no illusion that these small decisions will solve the climate crisis or be enough to support companies that do business differently. But I believe that <strong>we can all make a difference if we collectively decided to make more responsible choices every single day, with every commit</strong>.</p>
<h2 id="the-job-isnt-done">The job isn’t done</h2>
<p>That said, there are still several things on our to-do list that could further reduce this website’s impact:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Optimize code</strong>: While I tried to optimize code as much as possible during development, the design is based on a third-party theme, so there’s probably still some low-hanging fruits in the shape of unused code laying around.</li>
<li><strong>Improve accessibility</strong>: This website’s theme has been designed with accessibility in mind, but I haven’t done any in-depth accessibility testing other than the basic automated checks.</li>
<li><strong>Review hosting supply chain</strong>: There might be more sustainable hosting and domain management options out there, and that’s certainly something I’d like to learn more about moving forward.</li>
</ul>Alja IsakovićThe goal of ResponsibleTech.Work is to help all of us make more responsible decisions. When I was developing this website, I found it important to follow responsible principles outlined in the framework and make a number of small decisions to show how websites can be developed more responsibly.Starting the conversation on responsible tech work2021-08-02T07:58:00+00:002021-08-02T07:58:00+00:00https://responsibletech.work/blog/2021/8/2/starting-the-conversation<p>Today we’re launching the first draft of the ResponsibleTech.Work framework, which is still very much a work in progress. By publishing the website early, we hope to start the conversation, get your feedback, and form a core team of contributors. Here’s what’s still missing, what the launch plans are, and how you can get involved if you’d like to help the project evolve.</p>
<h2 id="about-responsibletechwork">About ResponsibleTech.Work</h2>
<p>The purpose of this project is to get tech workers curious about different ways we can make our work more responsible, collaborate on suggestions on how to improve the most commonly used methodologies and tools, and provide links to resources where we can all learn more about key topics related to responsible product development.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In short, <strong>the ResponsibleTech.Work website would like to help anyone interested in making their work more responsible find concrete tools and resources</strong>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The project isn’t owned by any single individual or organization. We envision it as a <strong>collaborative effort to inspire and support responsible action in the tech industry</strong>. It’s an attempt to create small ripples that will hopefully end up challenging business as usual. You can read more about the core principles on the <a href="/about/">framework’s about page</a>.</p>
<h2 id="whats-available-and-whats-missing">What’s available and what’s missing</h2>
<p>The initial draft website we’re publishing today introduces the core ideas of the framework. Before a wider release, we’d like to:</p>
<ul>
<li>complete the first version of the <a href="/methodologies/">Methodologies</a> section by adding <em>Product innovation</em> and <em>Product development</em> methodologies,</li>
<li>add <a href="/tools/">Tools</a> from the fields of software development (e.g., <em>responsible user stories</em>) and user experience design that are still under development,</li>
<li>implement a few design and code tweaks and optimizations,</li>
<li>expand the core team.</li>
</ul>
<blockquote>
<p>But the key thing that’s still missing is <strong>your feedback and more diverse perspectives</strong>, so please send <strong>your feedback and ideas at <a href="mailto:info@ResponsibleTech.Work">info@ResponsibleTech.Work</a></strong> and <strong>get in touch if you’d like to join the core team</strong>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Even though some parts are still incomplete, you can share the link with people who might find it interesting and would like to follow the development of this project. We hope to have a more complete first version ready in September/October of this year.</p>
<p>Currently, the website is in English only, the working language of the tech industry. With time and sufficient interest, we hope to add support for other languages to make the content more accessible to a broader audience.</p>
<h2 id="who-are-we">Who are we?</h2>
<p>It started with a single tech worker, frustrated by the way things are done in the industry. By sharing the initial idea with others, she realized she isn’t alone in wanting to <em>do something</em> beyond criticizing EvilCorps. Our goal is to <strong>change the tech industry little by little, day by day</strong>.</p>
<p>These days, it’s rare for a week to go by without news about a known tech company misusing people’s data, abusive work conditions, or worse. And while there’s increasing awareness that we must do better and a lot of wonderful organizations fighting the good fight, we believe there’s still <strong>too little information on how you (yes, you!) can do better every single day you show up for work</strong>.</p>
<p>This is where we hope ResponsibleTech.Work comes in. We’ll hope you’ll join us by sharing and implementing ResponsibleTech.Work at your workplace or by <a href="/contribute/">contributing</a> and joining the team.</p>ResponsibleTech.Work teamToday we're launching the first draft of the ResponsibleTech.Work framework, which is still very much a work in progress. By publishing the website early, we hope to start the conversation, get your feedback, and form a core team of contributors. Here's what's still missing, what the launch plans are, and how you can get involved if you'd like to help the project evolve.