DataKind UK Data Ethics Book Club processes and materials

This is DataKind UK’s intro to setting up a data ethics book club. We started in 2019, with seven book club events. They were run every 6-8 weeks or so in London, Edinburgh and remotely.

There has been interest from others who would like to replicate (and, we hope, improve!), and we

It’s not just a books - we used books as well as journal articles, blogs, news stories, videos of talks and even poems.

The aims of the book club before starting were to:

1. To foster discussions of ethics issues among our data science community, and later on, the wider data science community, that they can take back to their day jobs/careers;
2. To educate and inform our community on ethical issues, to better enable them to support social change organisations; and
3. To strengthen our community of data scientists, social change organisations, and data for good enthusiasts.

General processes for a book club are found in Processes.

• What to think about for your book club
• Sample Facilitator Guide
• Sample Hosting Guide
• Sample Book Club FAQs

These topics were run by DataKind UK during 2019. They may help others get started too!

1. Impacts of Algorithms
2. Facial Recognition
3. Fairness in AI
4. Self-Driving Cars
5. AI and Gender
6. AI and Financial Inclusion
7. AI and Race

All materials used in the DataKind UK Data Ethics Book club are also provided:

• All materials

Please do contribute to the repo via Github (there’s a helpful guide to web-based changes here or use the git commandline if you prefer) or you can get in touch at [email protected]

The DataKind UK Data Ethics Book Club continues in 2020! Keep an eye out for local and remote events here or sign up to get newsletters/join the #ethics Slack channel.