Ethics Doing an ethics review
Doing an ethics review will help you:
- design, develop and maintain responsible services
- identify any unintended consequences of your service
How to do an ethics review
Make a copy of the ethics review template using Google Docs or Miro (both come with instructions).
You can do the review remotely or in person. There’s no time-limit, but for reference it took one team about 2 hours to do their review in person.
The outputs are likely to vary significantly depending on what your service does, who uses it, which phase of delivery you’re at and how information is stored and used.
When to do an ethics review
Your team should do an ethics review at least once in each phase (discovery, alpha, beta, live) - usually before your service assessment. You can then add actions to your backlog or work on them immediately.
Even if you’re not doing a service assessment, you should still consider the ethical principles and do an ethics review.
Discovery
We would encourage teams to conduct an ethics review at the start of their discovery phase. Consider what you know about your users already.
You may also decide to revisit your ethics review midway through the phase.
This will help determine the ethical elements of the problem you’re trying to solve.
Alpha
Given a solution is chosen, we would encourage teams to revisit their ethics review and finalise their views based on the decided solution.
Think about:
- anything new you may now need to consider
- if anything is now less risky or no longer an ethical issue
Further phases
As you iterate your service, ethical considerations should be taken whenever there’s a large change or addition.
If there are any doubts, teams are encouraged to revisit the ethical principles and their review to make sure they are following best practice.