Customizable ethics checklists for Big Data researchers

Deon is a project to create automated "ethics checklists" for data science projects; by default, running the code creates a comprehensive checklist covering data collection and storage, modeling and deployment: the checklist items aren't specific actions, they're "meant to provoke discussion among good-faith actors who take their ethical responsibilities seriously. Because of this, most of the items are framed as prompts to discuss or consider. Teams will want to document these discussions and decisions for posterity."

The lists can be customized for your own purposes, and if you think the default list needs revising, there's a democratic process for amending it.

Checklists are a powerful way to ensure that important steps are not missed out; the rise of surgical checklists made an enormous positive change in patient outcomes -- hilariously, though surgeons often chafe at having to refer to checklists while doing a procedure they've done a hundred times, they overwhelmingly say that they would prefer to have checklists in the mix any time they are the patients.

First and foremost, our goal is not to be arbitrators of what ethical concerns merit inclusion. We have a process for changing the default checklist, but we believe that many domain-specific concerns are not included and teams will benefit from developing custom checklists. Not every checklist item will be relevant. We encourage teams to remove items, sections, or mark items as N/A as the concerns of their projects dictate.

Second, we built our initial list from a set of proposed items on multiple checklists that we referenced.