Ethics of Search Infrastructures: Blogpost by postdoc Renée Ridgway
Postdoc in SHAPE’s Digital Activism project, Renée Ridgway, researches the ethics and politics of digital infrastructures and, more specifically, open search and alternatives to prevailing search hegemonies. Under these auspices, Renée is part of a working group on ethics coordinated by the Open Search Foundation (OSF), a European organization developing an open European infrastructure in web search.
By: Renée Ridgway, postdoc in SHAPE
Since September 2022, I have been participating in monthly, online meetings of the Ethics Working Group, organised by one of the founding members of OSF, Christine Plote [1]. The Open Search Foundation e.V. is a European movement of people and organisations that work together to create the foundation for independent, free and self-determined access to information on the Internet.
One of the working groups (Tech, Awareness, Ethics, Legal, Economy, Applications) within this structure, the ethics interdisciplinary research community encompasses a range of European researchers and software engineers from CERN’s openlab with the goal to build values-based foundations for the new ‘Internet index’ (OWS).
Open Web Search (OWS) is a forthcoming, open European infrastructure in web search, thereby instantiating European sovereignty for navigating and searching the web (https://openwebsearch.eu/). This open web index will be an ecosystem of search applications for specific purposes and data products, whilst developing in tandem a governance model that will facilitate and regulate a continuation of the project’s outcome, the open European infrastructure. Funded from September 2022-August 2025 by the European Commission under the Horizon programme, the consortium consists of 14 research partners and computer centres from seven European countries.
The Ethics Working Group (#ethicsinsearch) began with members contributing news articles and search projects of interest, ranging from EU legislation to the most recent developments of ChatGPT, which is part of my larger post-doctoral project that investigates search infrastructures and the ‘future of search’. Addressing ethical issues, some of the core values of the working group include openness, transparency, privacy, diversity, and trust along with how they benefit society, yet they also need to be compliant with EU regulations such as the Digital Services Act.
At monthly meetings, we have been feeding topics into a shared ethical discourse and simultaneously monitoring the research and development of the technical side of the search index. At each step, we focus on ethical concerns and issues, introducing ‘ethics-by-design’ and ‘law-by-design’ approaches, as well as incorporating a code of conduct. Ultimately, we will deliver an ethical framework, or a ‘values compass’ for open internet search in addition to initiating public discourse and awareness about ethical search at stages along the way. Besides monthly online meetings, I will be attending the upcoming ELSA (Ethical, Legal, Societal Aspects) workshop of Open Web Search on-site in Graz, Austria on April 19-20, where we plan to formulate our thoughts and ideas into a position paper and, eventually, a journal article.