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Community Conversations: Building an Ethical and Equitable Data Culture

  • CTData Collaborative - Zoom (map)

This month, we'll have a community conversation exploring how to cultivate an ethical and equitable data culture. Many organizations aim to develop a data culture. However, without ethics and equity as guiding principles, we risk developing data cultures that take data from the community without consideration of community needs and risk perpetuating biases and discrimination.

Together, we'll discuss frameworks for embedding ethics and equity into the core of an organization's data culture. First, we will explore what a data culture looks like and how we have taken steps within our organizations to get there. Next, we will investigate how ethics/equity factor into the equation. Key questions we'll unpack include:

  • What comes to mind when you think of an ethical data culture?

  • What are some core ethical principles that should guide a data culture?

  • How can we make equity a foundational part of our data culture?

  • What role does data literacy play in an organization's data culture?

  • What governance and accountability measures ensure ethical and equitable data use?

By sharing our perspectives and experiences, we can learn from each other and create data cultures that center equity and ethics throughout each stage of the data life cycle.

About this group:

We are a group of data users in Connecticut who are supporting one another as we work toward more equitable data practices. We focus on racial equity explicitly but not exclusively.

Some of the topics we talk about include:

  • How can we make sure we don't make certain groups invisible through how we disaggregate our data?

  • How can we learn to focus our attention on the strengths, rather than the deficits, of groups we are seeking to serve or support?

  • How can we learn from the people who we hope will benefit from our products or services about what their data means to them?

  • How can we help the institutions that we are part of to be trustworthy so that people will trust us with their information/data?

You can read more about our past events here.

Please feel free to check out the group. And if it is helpful, please share it!