Stanford Seminar - Ethics Governance-in-the-Making: Bridging Ethics Work & Governance Menlo Report

Ethics Governance-in-the-Making: Bridging Ethics Work and Governance in the Menlo Report Megan Finn of University of Washington Katie Shilton of University of Maryland, College Park October 21, 2022 The 2012 Menlo Report was an effort in which a group of computer scientists, US government funders, and lawyers produced ethics guidelines for research in information and communications technology. Using Menlo as a case study, we find that ethics governance-in-the-making is composed of processes that combine controversies of ethics and justice in the co-production of technoscience and society, the everyday ethics work of actors engaged in scientific and technical practice, and ethics as a form of governance in scientific and technical communities. Interviews with authors and analysis of the Menlo Report documents reveal a story of marshalling human and financial resources from a particular subfield within ICT research network measurement and network security research to close controversies worrying both researchers and funders. To create the Menlo Report, authors and funders relied on bricolage work with existing, available resources, significantly shaping both the report s contents and impacts. Report authors were motivated by both forward- and backward-looking goals: enabling new data sharing as well as addressing the status of a research record thrown into ethical question by controversial studies. Authors also grappled with uncertainty about when ethical frameworks were appropriate and made the decision to classify much network data as human subjects data. Finally, the Menlo Report authors attempted to enroll multiple networks in governance through appeals to local research communities as well as taking steps towards federal rulemaking. This analysis of the Menlo Report suggests analytical lenses for study of current and future ethics governance in computer science. The Menlo Report serves as a case study in how to study ethics governance-in-the-making: with