This week’s guests are Mathew Mytka and Alja Isakovoić, Co-Founders of Tethix, a company that builds products that embed ethics into the fabric of your organization. We discuss Matt and Alja’s core mission to bring ethical tech to the world, and Tethix’s services that work with your Agile development processes. You’ll learn about Tethix’s solution to address 'The Intent to Action Gap,' and what Elemental Ethics can provide organizations beyond other ethics frameworks. We discuss ways to become a proactive Responsible Firekeeper, rather than remaining a reactive Firefighter, and how ETHOS, Tethix's suite of apps can help organizations embody and embed ethics into everyday practice.
TOPICS COVERED:
What inspired Mat & Alja to co-found Tethix and the company's core mission
What the 'Intent to Action Gap' is and how Tethix address it
Overview of Tethix's Elemental Ethics framework; and how it empowers product development teams to 'close the 'Intent to Action Gap' and move orgs from a state of 'Agile Firefighting' to 'Responsible Firekeeping'
Why Agile is an insufficient process for embedding ethics into software and product development; and how you can turn to Elemental Ethics and Responsible Firekeeping to embed 'Ethics-by-Design' into your Agile workflows
The definition of 'Responsible Firekeeping' and its benefits; and how Ethical Firekeeping transitions Agile teams from a reactive posture to a proactive one
Why you should choose Elemental Ethics over conventional ethics frameworks
Tethix's suite of apps called ETHOS: The Ethical Tension and Health Operating System apps, which help teams embed ethics into their collaboration tech stack (e.g., JIRA, Slack, Figma, Zoom, etc.)
How you can become a Responsible Firekeeper
The level of effort required to implement Elemental Ethics & Responsible Firekeeping into Product Development based on org size and level of maturity
Alja's contribution to the ResponsibleTech.Work, an open source Responsible Product Development Framework, core elements of the Framework, and why we need it
You know, our mission is really about helping to address that - dedicated to helping people reimagine and create technology that enables collective human flourishing. You know, and we're passionate. We've fallen in love with this problem -this 'ethical intent to action gap' that pervades the tech industry, and we're dedicated to figuring out how to solve it.
Debra J Farber:
Hello, I am Debra J Farber. Welcome to The Shifting Privacy Left Podcast, where we talk about embedding privacy by design and default into the engineering function to prevent privacy harms to humans, and to prevent dystopia. Each week, we'll bring you unique discussions with global privacy technologists and innovators working at the bleeding edge of privacy research and emerging technologies, standards, business models, and ecosystems. Today, I'm delighted to welcome my next two guests, Mathew Mytka and Alja Isaković, Co-Founders at Tethix, a company that builds products that enable you to embed ethics into the fabric of your organization and that help you embody your E-T-H-O-S, which we'll talk about later today.
Debra J Farber:
Mat lives in Sydney, Australia, and describes himself as a 'Moral Imagineer,' System Thinker, and Doer. Drawing from various disciplines and a diverse career, he helps people reimagine and design organizations, products, services, and business models that support human well-being and planetary flourishing. "With Tethix, he says, you can plant seeds of good intentions and grow products you can be proud of." Alja lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and her work at Tethix aligns with her passion imagining a more inclusive future in which tech innovation supports learning and community building, helps us take better care of each other and our planet, and brings joy and playfulness into our lives. She's also a founding contributor to the ResponsibleTech Work framework (which is also a URL address), which proposes practical tools for more responsible product development in the tech industry, based on core guiding principles. Today, we're going to be talking about a really interesting concept called 'Responsible Firekeeping.' Welcome, Matt and Alja. I'm really excited to talk to you about this today.
Alja Isaković:
Thanks for having us, we're excited to be here.
Mathew Mytka:
Yeah, thanks, Debra. It's an absolute pleasure.
Debra J Farber:
There are a lot of big words and utopian (and I don't say that in a negative way), goals - that you're aiming to bring ethical tech to the world - that I hear in your marketing there. What prompted you to found Tethix and what's your core mission?
Mathew Mytka:
Yeah, it's a great question. We do have a leaning towards being optimistic, if not purely for our own mental health, I think. What prompted us, really, is seeing many of the problems out there in tech and really just building on the decade or more of really seeing the implications of a lack of care and respect for what technology can do, a negative impact of technology and technology development on people and the planet. Our mission is really about helping to address that, dedicated to helping people reimagine and create technology that enables collective human flourishing, And, we're passionate; we're falling in love with this problem, this ethical intent to action gap that pervades the tech industry; and we're dedicated to figuring out how to solve it.
Debra J Farber:
So, you mentioned this gap. Can you unpack that for us?
Mathew Mytka:
This is a tricky one, but we'll try and narrow in on it; and I guess I'll talk a little bit about examples. I think the intent to action gap, in general, is essentially what we do in our behavior does not necessarily always match our intentions, and there's this gap between what we might say or stand for and what we actually do in our work. I'll make reference to a study that was done through MIT and company called Culture X back in 2020. It was a research looking at corporate value statements of Fortune 500 companies. They looked at all these statements and then surveyed the employees; and essentially they found the questions around that for the employees were around "does the behavior of your company, does the culture of your company, reflect these value statements that get made?" They found no statistical correlation between the behaviors and the value statements. And, this is probably no surprise for many people.
Mathew Mytka:
You can understand people within cross functional product teams that might be building technology, as an example, are always under immense pressure. There's lots of constraints, there's pressure to move fast and break things. An example of this in privacy is cookie notices and privacy policies, and "we take your privacy seriously. Pat Walsh, the lovely Pat Walsh, who many of the listeners are probably familiar with. Put that conger in there.
Mathew Mytka:
"We take your privacy seriously!" [Debra: With an exclamation point at the end, I'm sure.] I think there's the ethics washing, there's the trust washing aspects of this where there's no genuine intent, but a lot of organizations, a lot of people want to actually reflect the values, the things that they say they care about, that they want to stand for, that they'll fight to defend; but there are a lot of systemic challenges as well. You know, we've got extractive, destructive, and linear socioeconomic systems, and shareholder primacy, and that disconnect from our nature and our natural world. So, our approach at Tethix is looking to solve for that, for companies, individuals, organizations, practitioners that have that intention, that really want to live and breathe what they want to stand for, particularly in this ethical sense where we're working to support them and also trying to account for some of these systemic challenges as well.
Debra J Farber:
Thank you for that. And so, to address this gap, I know that Tethix has created an ethical framework that you call Elemental Ethics, which I think the audience is going to find fascinating. Tethix - their stated goal with Elemental Ethics is "to move companies from a state of agile firefighting to responsible fire keeping. Tell us a little bit about that. What is Elemental Ethics, and how does Elemental Ethics help product development teams embark on what you call the 'deliberate for the good' path?
Alja Isaković:
That's a great question, Debra. Because of what Mat was just saying about the intent to action gap being a symptom of so many systemic problems, we really think a different approach is needed. So, we don't really see Elemental Ethics as a typical framework, but more a new way of learning, doing, thinking, relating, and working. We really think that we need the new language, new narratives, to deliberately choose better future paths because, as we all know, many of the products that we're building are not in fact making the world a better place, as tech startups often like to promise. So, with Elemental Ethics, we emphasize 4 core skills (or elements, as we call them) that we need to balance to make better product decisions in everyday practice.
Alja Isaković:
Now, most tech companies are focused on technology and practice, which is the fire element.
Alja Isaković:
With technology, we're building and starting all these new fires; 1) but in order to maintain a healthy fire, you actually need to get to know and work with other elements. 2 1) This means improving the airflow, and what we mean by that is communication and collaboration within an organization; 3 2) grounding yourself in earth by doing research and exploration of diverse perspectives outside the organization;
Alja Isaković:
4) Take the time to pause and reflect on what you're doing, which represents the water that you can use to extinguish the fires that accidentally start through your technology and practice. You might have noticed that a lot of the language we use draws inspiration from nature, because we really want to also emphasize the ecological challenges we are facing today; and we think that ethics is not just about being nice to each other but elevating the most important conversations we really need to have as a species to ensure our future survival on this planet. Given the impact that tech has in our lives and, like Mat was saying, all the material resources it's extracting and relying on, we really have our responsibility as technologists to think of non-human stakeholders and the broad systemic impacts of the tech we're building. We really hope that Elemental Ethics can contribute to this narrative shift we need in product development.
Debra J Farber:
It's fascinating and obviously that sounds like something. . . like who wouldn't want to sign up for that. Right? So, let's get into a little more depth with the concept of 'Responsible Fire keeping," now that you've articulated the underpinning of the Elemental Ethics. If we already have Agile development processes, why do companies need to consider an additional approach for ethics? How is Agile insufficient?
Mathew Mytka:
Yeah, that's a good question. We don't want to introduce too much of the new and this is part of the challenge which we might dive into as we explore this. As Alja was just saying, Agile is this fire- focused practice. It's concerned with delivering business value. So, the way that we practice agile traditionally - and there's obviously lots of variation in organizations and different organizational contexts - we're treating software development as this factory line, leaving no room for laws and approaches for these deeper ethical discussions, moral deliberation, and exercising of moral imagination because we get obsessed (be that incentivized, as well) because of KPIs and the way that we design metrics within organizations. We're obsessed with sprinting and shipping and velocity and that is different from what I believe, and what we believe, we actually need. I think many probably agree with this. If you've vehemently agree, that's excellent as well, because we enjoy diversity of perspectives on this.
Mathew Mytka:
So, on data protection side and privacy side, we might see this as a mindless data collection, collecting because you can, not because you should. . .no purpose specification and why you're actually collecting it in the first place, if you even actually need to. We see that, particularly in digital tech products; it's just so invasive. By always sprinting, we often end up starting these fires and then get exhausted by this constant bug-fixing, data breaches, and leaks, and PR problems that come from these downstream issues that we've created as a result of starting the fires.
Mathew Mytka:
We call that firefighting. We use these metaphors as a way to make sense of things, and for the most part, the language is very metaphorical; but, we're not saying throw out all of your existing processes. This is about interfacing and connecting in and embedding with the way that people already work. What we're saying is that practice, which is generally driven by fire, needs to be balanced with these other elements that Alja was getting at: the collaboration, the research, exploration, pause, and reflection. This is what we do with Elemental Ethics and what it actually brings attention to.
Debra J Farber:
So, define 'Responsible Firekeeping' for us.
Mathew Mytka:
At its essence, Responsible Fire keeping is about, like I said, balancing the fire of technology practice with these other elements. So, instead of wasting time in meetings due to miscommunications and people maybe misinterpreting the acceptance criteria in a user story, giving people time and space to tell stories and learn from each other and explore where the values that they want to stand for actually come to life in the products and services that they build and the features that they actually are working on. So, instead of this ethics washing that tends to take place in a lot of cognitive and moral dissonance that people might face at work, you learn how to embody these principles and values that you say you stand for. Many organizations have them and there's issues with that that I'll just briefly touch on as well. You're building more trust by demonstrating what you are doing is more aligned to what you say you care about and what you value as an organization.
Mathew Mytka:
This gap exists for lots of different reasons. There's just lots of systemic challenges, but it's generally top-down and exclusive. These things are kind of imposed, disconnected from workflows. Business metrics generally win in the end, as I was mentioning before. Yeah, so Fire Fighting versus Responsible Firekeeping.
Debra J Farber:
How does responsible fire keeping shift organizations? Basically, what benefits can be realized from this approach? And you mentioned trust. I just wanted to give opportunity to see if there's additional benefits as well.
Mathew Mytka:
Yeah, I mean additional benefits for this, the cost that comes downstream from this incessant firefighting - there's cost reduction no doubt that comes to this. When you're being proactive, you think of privacy by design and privacy engineering. When organizations are actually being proactive about this in the way that they're actually designing and developing, engineering products and services, it might have some upfront cost. There's a shift in approaches, particularly when this stuff is being introduced. But downstream, you're saving a whole bunch of money. You're reducing risk for large publicly listed companies. You're reducing the risk of a trust breach.
Mathew Mytka:
There's lots of evidence to show that these breaches of trust that are reflective of how trustworthy you are as an organization, which is a function of you demonstrating that you have integrity and be able to follow through on the value that you promise and the values that you stand for. That impacts bottom line business metrics that you're not seeing your stakeholders, as an example, care about. You know, EBITDA and these bottom line business values. There's an economic argument for this, let alone something like the productivity impacts that likely come, which we're really interested in doing some research on into next year, with some pilot programs on the dissonance that practitioners, people within organizations face when they know that what they say they're meant to stand for is actually not reflected in what they do.
Debra J Farber:
It just makes me think of the song by Fun - "what do you stand for? It just keeps coming in my head the entire conversation so far, so I just needed to get that out.
Mathew Mytka:
I love that. I love that.
Debra J Farber:
What I hear you saying, too, is that this Ethical Fire keeping can help transition an Agile team from being reactive to be more proactive, which is also one of the principles of privacy by design. So, it definitely seems like something that organizations should at least find out more about - Responsible Fire keeping in your ethical framework. Let me ask, why should organizations consider choosing Elemental Ethics over conventional ethics frameworks?
Alja Isaković:
That's a great question and I think Matt already touched on a lot of the benefits related to trust, risk management, and all of these things. An important difference that I think it's also worth emphasizing is that conventional ethics frameworks tend to be top- down in position of values and principles that are usually chosen by the founders, sometimes even defined by external consultants. So, to use a bit of the language from The Agile Manifesto, which has its place in time and it was the shift in narrative, the way we compare Elemental Ethics to conventional ways of doing ethics is that Elemental Ethics is essentially choosing to tell living stories that grow with the organization over having posters with values that gather dust on walls. It's about awakening your moral imagination and playfulness over using language that's too abstract to be relatable and applicable.
Alja Isaković:
Elemental Ethics is about being useful in practice at all levels of the organization over impressing stakeholders on a website and being forgotten by everyone else. Elemental Ethics is choosing something shaped by practitioners, mindful of tensions and oriented towards action over a framework or process shaped by consultants without firsthand experiences of everyday ethical tensions in the field. So, Elemental Ethics is about embodying and embedding ethics at all levels of the organization as a living process. It's something that can really grow with the organization to meet the different challenges, as opposed to conventional frameworks that essentially see ethics as a checklist, as a static exercise that you do once. Right? Even if you've shifted left, you do it once and then it's forgotten. It becomes a static poster on a wall with a value that nobody really knows how to interpret.
Mathew Mytka:
In a confluence page rather than on a poster on a wall, just in a Confluence space, like an internal intranet knowledge space that no one actually visits.
Alja Isaković:
Or part of HR training that you do once or maybe get refreshed once every quarter, but then you have deadlines and budget constraints that make you forget all about the wonderful good intentions that you have written on the website.
Debra J Farber:
Right, and HR while maybe they come up with it (and it's well-intentioned) is not expert at embedding values into engineering, so I could understand where there is definitely a big gap. So tell us, you've got this other concept called ETHOS, which is an acronym and it stands for the 'Ethical Tension and Health Operating System.' Tell us about ETHOS.
Alja Isaković:
Yes. So, like you said, we really want to help organizations embody and embed ethics into everyday practice so it's not just forgotten as a set of values or like a training you do once in a while, and that's why we're building the ETHOS suite of apps that integrate with your existing tools. So, for instance, we'll have an ETHOS app for Slack because that's where most of our conversations now happen, an ETHOS app for Jira to support software development, an ETHOS app for Figma for designers, ETHOS for Zoom, and so on. We really want to meet everyone where their daily practice happens at different levels in the organizations, and all of these ETHOS apps connect together to help you keep track of all the ethical tensions, and the overall health in your organizations, and to guide you towards nurturing your values and principles with action.
Alja Isaković:
So there's nothing wrong with having explicit values and principles.
Alja Isaković:
The problem is that they're usually forgotten and nobody really understands how to nurture them. This is where the ETHOS apps help you. We also really want to reduce the friction of shifting - not just privacy, but all these different areas of responsibility - left by integrating with existing tools and help people learn and develop their Elemental Ethics skills by doing. All the ETHOS apps are designed to grow with teams within our organization to meet their maturity level because, like we said, ethics is not a static checkbox exercise. It's a living process and, at the same time, we also want to make ethics fun, accessible, and something that makes you smile, which are not usually words that you associate with ethics. So, to give you a practical example what this means, in ETHOS apps, instead of developing a traditional dashboard with charts and metrics, we are developing the ETHOS garden as a living space that your team can . . .anyone on the team or in the organization can visit and see how their practice is nurturing their good intentions. So, a space that really reflects your embodiment of the ethics that you do.
Debra J Farber:
That's fascinating. Besides privacy, what are some of the other ethical tensions that are addressed in ETHOS and in your overall Elemental Ethics framework?
Alja Isaković:
This is entirely up to each organization because each organization is unique and the problem that a lot of ethics or ethics related frameworks have is that they try to find one solution to fit them all; and we intentionally design all our frameworks and apps to be really modifiable and that they can meet teams where they're at so that they can integrate with different ways of working, different processes. This is really important, I think, for any ethics tool to succeed; you really have to adapt to the people who are using it.
Debra J Farber:
Thank you for that. That's really helpful. How can a person or an organization become a Responsible Firekeeper? Can you just walk us through, I guess, a best practices approach?
Mathew Mytka:
Yeah, best practice is probably one of the things that is somewhat of a challenge, but we'll weave this perspective in here. Change happens at different levels of the organization. It's organizational and it's personal, so it's got to be bottom- up, top- down, middle- in and -out, and that's really a crucial element. What we were referring to before was that top- down, an exclusive aspect. That's why there's part of the problem.
Mathew Mytka:
If you're imposing these values, ensure that any of your ethical, your purpose, your values, your principles that you might have formally defined, that needs to actually reflect how people feel across an organization. In a bigger organization it's probably more work that's actually got to be done. Just building on what Alja was saying, Elemental Ethics, it implicitly reflects our values and our principles that we have as an organization, particularly an ecological orientation. That's reflected in the nature metaphors, as an example. There's a lot about accounting for a pluralism of these values. So, we do tend to have a fat bell curve of distribution of values. Humans tend to have very common ways of expressing what we actually care about in these moral senses, you know like social justice, and human agency, and accountability, and openness, and transparency, and things like that tend to commonly come up. So, when those are getting defined, ensuring that the discussions about what it actually means are reflected across the organization and people actually understand what that means. You would see the same in privacy. What does that mean in context when you're building? What does that mean to the stakeholders, the communities in which you might serve, or impact as an organization? There's a lot that can be done on a personal level by just going beyond this fire: aiming more for collaboration and diversity within the organization; looking at research and learnings from different, diverse fields; really trying to be multi-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary and taking time to pause and reflect - you know, dare to ask those questions, those tough questions; becoming an advocate. So, those types of practices. You'll see those. . . there's the privacy advocates in organizations and you need to. . . not everyone's going to be those, but that needs to be reflected as part of the culture and encouraged. This idea of creating the psychological safety for hunch cultures. When people feel that something isn't right, making sure that that place and space is there to actually be able to. . .people speak up and say, "oh hey, I think this new feature, or the way that we've defined it, is designed in a way that is taking advantage of people. We say that we value our customers' agency and their autonomy that we're actually taking it away here." We're working against them in some onboarding process or something like that. That's at a CX design level, but it might also be just in the way that things are engineered, as well, or architected. So, your listeners might have that experience of being an advocate for shifting privacy left in their organization. Thinking about it like that, those best practices do start with those conversations do start sometimes with people being those advocates and spreading out.
Mathew Mytka:
We also offer lots of workshops, as well; we like to support people in this process. We're building product that. . .we're also doing a lot of training that builds on many years of experience and instructional design, particularly between myself and Alja. I helped start Australia's first entrepreneurial college and really love helping people learn.
Mathew Mytka:
Alja's long part of her past decade and more working to design courses and curricula and learning materials. So, we offer workshops for teams and organizations that want to develop these elemental skills and learn how to look beyond this allure of the fire and just increase that possibility space - so that you can the things that you want to make the most possible, the things that you want to care about become the most possible. Next year, we'll be releasing the first in the suite of ETHOS apps, which will support these teams and organizations in this transformation process, in this metamorphosis from firefighting to Responsible Firekeeping, and helping them to translate this high-level intent that they might have into actionable pledges, commitments, and have those nurtured in their ETHOS garden. To get a better idea of this, as well for the listeners that might work in an organization interested in this, you can read "A Day in the Life of the Responsible Firekeeper," a wonderful blog that Alja wrote and that goes through 'What does it actually look like?' in a reasonable amount of detail, so in a relatable story.
Debra J Farber:
I will put a link to that in our Show Notes so that'll be easy for people to find the blog post. What it sounds like to me is that ETHOS - the Ethical Tension and Health Operating System, the suite of apps that helps with implementing elemental ethics into your organization - it sounds like any company defines what their values are and this suite of tools will help in the proactive engagement of communication and feedback loops and ability to speak up, and it facilitates a ongoing dialogue with these values and these ethical tensions presented to the developers within their workflow so that they can surface and address ethical issues. Is that generally what I'm hearing?
Alja Isaković:
Yeah, that's a fairly accurate description. Obviously, it's way easier to understand once we have the apps out and ready to be used. But yeah, essentially, it's up to every team to decide what they want to nurture in their ETHOS garden and what they want to pay attention to; and this might change over time.
Debra J Farber:
Great. I wanted to just stress that it's not like adopt your ethical view on things and then its. . .Elemental Ethics is Tethix's view on how any organization should implement their values; but instead, it's a process and you define your own values as an org, and your approach is how do you deal with the tensions and to facilitate that within the engineering workflow?
Alja Isaković:
Yeah, essentially, Elemental Ethics is the underlying philosophy, and we'll be using a lot of that - just the language and the metaphors - in the user interface, for example. We might have suggested starting seed sets of values or principles to make this process easier for you. It's always best. . . you know, like the IKEA effect, when teams choose their own good intentions that they want to work towards, and it will also depend on just where they are in the organization. For example, if it's a team that's responsible for, let's say, bringing generative AI into their product, they might take something like the European Commission's principles for Trustworthy AI and make those the seeds that they nurture as they figure out how to integrate AI in their product. Or, if it's a team that's tasked with improving the privacy of a product or something like that, they might have privacy as the core value that they nurture in their ETHOS garden. So, yeah, it's absolutely modifiable and adjustable, as it should be, because we are not there to impose our value system, but we do provide the underlying philosophy, and the metaphors, and the language that's used in the apps.
Debra J Farber:
Yeah, it seems like it really helps with the 'by design' approaches: security- by- design, privacy- by- design, ethics- by- design. It'll help you embed it into your Agile processes. So, I think that's really unique and I really like the approach. I am curious, how hard do you think this would be to. . . what's the level of effort required to embed this into engineering practices for a small but growing company versus an enterprise? I know you probably haven't done this yet, so it's just more around what are you envisioning would be some of the tensions, or how hard it would be, or how would you approach it if you were an enterprise versus a small but fast growing company?
Mathew Mytka:
Yeah, that's a really, really good question and it varies. We're trying to design something that is able to be adaptable and extensible depending on your organizational context. So, like Alja referenced, if you don't have formally defined ethical values in relation to the technology you're building, or you're going down to principles and your guidelines for actions that principles are meant to represent, we're offering this easy way to get started by having these seeds that reflect lots of the different, already- defined and common language that's used in technology and that might be adaptions of Salesforce or privacy- by- design, and taking those principles - the seven principles of privacy by design - having those in what we call 'The Seeds Catalog.' When you take those, you pick and choose, and you plant them. You plant them in your ETHOS Garden and this becomes, if you're using a Slack app or it's integrated within Jira, you can get started pretty quickly. That's the whole idea.
Mathew Mytka:
For larger organizations, they might already have these values defined.
Mathew Mytka:
So, it's about having those populated, being able to have those reflected in terms of a starting process and how technical our kind of technology, our interim CTO, he calls it 'Tethix Runtime,' like how you integrate it with your existing enterprise IT fabric - that whole idea of being able to get up and get started.
Mathew Mytka:
In a large organization, you know, 5,000, 10,000+ employees, that's obviously going to take a little bit more time because there's a lot more people within the organization that need to adapt and work with this, and have them including the process. So, you might file it something within a specific product team, for instance. It's got a. . . in a larger organization, it's actually got to have the authorizing environment to do this to some degree for it to actually translate into that larger-scale cultural change. But, it can also accommodate this ground-up approach, where there's people within a larger organization that are like, "we really love this!" hey've got the autonomy within their business units or within their part of the business to adopt a tool like this and integrate it within their task management; their project management type software, like JIRA; or something like Slack, as an example.
Alja Isaković:
I just wanted to add that we essentially have different experiences in working with different-sized organizations; and as we're developing these ETHIS apps, we're also thinking how they might be used from the smaller scrappy startups that are just getting started to the large organization. We're trying to really design something that will grow with the organization, no matter what the starting size is, and essentially support ethics as a living process that changes as the organization changes, matures, and encounters different challenges.
Debra J Farber:
It seems like ethics should have its own lifecycle, the same way we have the 'software development lifecycle,' and the 'data lifecycle' and the 'DevOps lifecycle.' It seems that there should be also an ability to constantly monitor and get feedback for and test your ethical framework as well, so that makes a lot of sense. Alja, I'd love to turn our attention to talk about the ResponsibleTech. Work framework that you've been contributing to. Tell us about why we need a Responsible Product Development Framework and what is the goal of the framework?
Alja Isaković:
Yeah, thanks for this question. I basically started ResponsibleTech. Work because I think we need practical tools that can help tech workers take responsibility for their work, regardless of job title. The work I do with Tethix is more focused on supporting organizations and teams. ResponsibleTech. W Responsibletechwork is about inspiring and empowering tech workers who might not be working in an organization. That's fully on board with the whole ethical responsible thing. So, it is a pretty small open source project that essentially anyone can use to learn more about different areas of responsible product development.
Alja Isaković:
Using familiar language and talking about responsible product development or responsible AI, it's such a big word that encompasses so many things; and it's really hard for any one person to become an expert in privacy, ethics, sustainability, accessibility and all these other areas that essentially fall under responsible product development. I think it's still important to have, for anyone that works in tech, a broad awareness of these different topics and questions that you should be asking. So, with ResponsibleTech. W ResponsibleTechwork, we want to introduce all these aspects in a simple way without using complicated that's That's often using academic research or a lot of the tools that are out . Even even responsible tech reports use a lot of really complicated language. The focus with the framework or this open source project is essentially to offer practical tools that can help you in your day- to- day work, not just learning about an abstract ideal.
Debra J Farber:
Awesome. What are some of the core elements of the framework and how does that help guide on responsible product development?
Alja Isaković:
If you go to our website - and the name is the URL to make it easier to find - you'll find pledges that can inspire tech workers to act and start conversations in their workplace about all these different areas of responsibility. We have resources on methodologies that can help you evolve your existing practice and tools that can help you act more responsibly every day. The main tool we've developed so far is called PledgeWorks, which introduces pledge writing into existing processes as a way to seek better outcomes within a given context. Like all my other work, with PledgeWorks, this tool is also not prescriptive and pledges are intended to be adapted and modified to fit different contexts and processes. As Matt was saying before, we are also using pledges in a lot of the work we do with Tethix.
Alja Isaković:
For instance, in the ETHOS app, we'll be supporting pledge writing because we really think that writing actionable commitments within a context and limited time frame is a great tool to help you think about how you'll translate your good intentions into concrete action. So, here we're coming full circle to where we started this conversation to the intent to action gap. As you can see, Matt, myself, and our diverse collaborators from around the world are really passionate about approaching this problem from different angles to support both organizations and individuals that really want to do good in the world. It is our core belief that people want to do good. They just need the right environment, the right support, the right language, the right stories. So, the intent to action gap is the problem worth solving for us, and it's how we really want to use our diverse expertise and knowledge to make a difference in the tech industry.
Debra J Farber:
I love it. I think that's awesome. I love the intent behind it and I definitely am going to be paying attention to Tethix's development over the next several years. I'm really excited for what you're bringing to market and how that's going to help many teams and, ultimately, the customers. The outcomes of these products is going to be better products and services for individuals, so that makes me excited. If listeners want to delve deeper into Responsible Fire keeping, this concept, and learn more, where should they go? What should they read? What do you recommend?
Alja Isaković:
We talked about a lot of things today, so if any of this resonated, we invite listeners to visit our website at Tethix. co where they can browse our workshop catalog to find workshops on Responsible Fire keeping and other topics. Browse our other offerings. If they want to keep track of what we're developing and thinking about, they can subscribe to the Pathfinder's Newmoonsl etter and our Substack publication. We also hope they'll send us an email if they want to visit our virtual tea garden and have a chat about how we can help you transform the way you think, talk, feel and do Tech Ethics.
Debra J Farber:
I just want to be part of a virtual tea garden. That sounds like fun.
Alja Isaković:
Yeah, you should visit. You should visit. We have a blog post and video with a tour of that. It's how we do our meetings. We don't usually use Zoom because we also experiment with virtual spaces to help with learning and memory encoding and bring a bit of playfulness in a workspace. So, all our meetings happen in our virtual tea garden.
Debra J Farber:
Awesome. I love it. Do you have any words of wisdom that you'd like to share with the audience before we close today?
Mathew Mytka:
I guess, as Alja had mentioned, tech ethics - it's intimidating. So, the important part is just to start. We launched a series of challenges, as an example, on LinkedIn just recently, called Tethix Pathf inding Seeds that challenge you to practice your elemental skills in small but accessible ways. Those tiny steps have compounding effects. So, just getting started with these things is really important, rather than waiting for permission, or waiting to have a clear view, or formally your purpose, your values, your principles defined in detail. Just getting started. Making time to slow down, sit down around the campfire and bring your own tea garden, whether physical or virtual. Tell stories. Learn from each other. Most people care about this stuff. These are probably some of the most important questions and discussions for us to be having at this point in time, considering the impact that our technology has on the world around us and our role as a species. So, just start; have these conversations; learn; grow; and, that'll compound over time.
Debra J Farber:
Well, thank you so much, Matt and Alja. It's been a pleasure. Thank you for joining us to talk about Ethical Fire keeping and Responsible Product Development. Until next Tuesday, everyone, when we'll be back with engaging content and another great guest, or guests. Thanks for joining us this week on Shifting Privacy Left. Make sure to visit our website, shiftingprivacyleft. com, where you can subscribe to updates, so you'll never miss a show. While you're at it, if you found this episode valuable, go ahead and share it with a friend. And, if you're an engineer who cares passionately about privacy, check out Privado: the developer- friendly privacy platform and sponsor of the show. To learn more, go to privado. ai. Be sure to tune in next Tuesday for a new episode. Bye for now.
Mat defines 'Responsible Firekeeping,' the benefits realized for using this approach, and how Ethical Firekeeping transitions Agile teams from being reactive to more proactive when it comes to privacy and ethics
Alja tells us about Tethix's suite of apps called ETHOS: The Ethical Tension and Health Operating System apps, which help teams embed ethics into their collaboration tech stack (JIRA, Slack, Figma, Zoom, etc.)
Mat & Alja discuss the level of effort required to implement Elemental Ethics & Responsible Firekeeping into Product Development based on organizations size and level of maturity
Alja & Mat share resources including: Tethix's Pathfinder Newmoonsletter, their website, their Substack publication, workshops, and Virtual Tea Garden; and they leave us with some words of wisdom
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