The importance of the involvement of stakeholders has been a central feature of our work right from the start.

The detachment of business and technology from the people it most affects arose in our work in academia, business and policy, particularly in AI, neurotechnology (even those working on curing neurological diseases!), synthetic biology, biotechnology, nanotechnology and materials science.

In our work on Artificial Intelligence this became more important than ever. This life changing technology must learn from the mistakes of the past.

‘We want to involve our stakeholders, but we don’t really know how’ was the response that we, and our partners the European Centre for Not-For-Profit Law, had heard very often. And as stakeholders we were regularly ‘consulted’ both in product development and the creation of technology regulation, but rarely knew how our input contributed or saw the issues we cared about reflected in the end result. We were not meaningfully involved in decision making. 

But what would meaningful involvement look like in practice? How could we advise companies and regulators on what works best? We wanted to help others and ourselves nail that problem.

So, with funding from the Mozilla Foundation we brought together over 140 Civil Society Groups, policy makers, regulators and business ethicists to co-created a detailed and practical “Framework For the Meaningful Involvement of Stakeholders’

The three Elements of the Framework have to date been applied to the development of products and services using Artificial Intelligence and to the Design and Delivery of Regulation. They are currently being piloted by the Netherlands Government, a US tech company and a university. More to come on that.

We also use them ourselves to guide whether or not we should take part in a consultation. The answer is often no. Consultations are so often not meaningful for participants or ultimately for those commissioning them.

All our work has a stakeholder involvement component. For more see other project pages.