Building And Engaging With Multi-stakeholder Panels For Developing Policy Recommendations

The UnBias project was successful in obtaining an UKRI EPSRC Digital Economy Theme ‘Telling the Tales of Engagement’ competition in 2017 to build and engage with multi-stakeholder panels to develop policy recommendations.

From the start of the project, UnBias operated in the spirit of an open multi-stakeholder process consisting of youth juries, user observation studies, engagement and outreach activities to bring together wide audiences including educators, civil society NGOs, regulators, industry and the general public to develop recommendations around algorithmic bias through education, design and regulatory guidelines.

In addition to policy related stakeholder engagement, the project had strong commitment to engaging with hard to reach (cohorts) and focused on working with young people in order promote digital literacy and work towards a future safe and fair internet for all.  In order to reach out to this cohort, the project explored developing online videos highlight issues of accountability in algorithmic decision making.

This award enabled researchers from Horizon Digital Economy Research to collaborate with Professor Matt Daniels of the Institute of World Politics and Director of the Good of All non-profit organisation to produce a report providing strong empirical validation of the educational benefits of video content on his Human Rights Network YouTube channel.  The channel was successful in reaching over 30 million views with over 50,000 subscribers.  More information about this work can be located here.