Review: #EthicsInSearch at the 6th Open Search Symposium #ossym24

At the sixth edition of the international Open Search Symposium #ossym24, the Open Search Foundation once again organised a dedicated session on the topic of ethics in Internet search with contributions from the field, current research topics and discussions.

Learning from Wikimedia

Nina Leseberg, Head of Communities & Engagement at Wikimedia Deutschland spoke in her keynote ‘Digital discourse: How the Wikipedia community ensures the quality of the digital encyclopaedia’ about the complex topic of community-based curation of content and gave insights into the practice of Wikipedia.

‘Exploring the ethical foundations of web search – perspectives and insights from research and practice’ – The OSF Ethics expert group presents its current work results

The expert panel of the OSF working group Ethics gave the audience insights into the work of recent years: Christine Plote, moderator of the expert group and OSF board member, Noor Afshan Fathima (CERN), Alexander Nussbaumer (TU Graz) and Renée Ridgway (University of Aarhus/SHAPE Centre, Denmark) reported on and discussed the experiences and results of defining ethical guidelines for open web search. The team presented the development of a catalogue of values, the assessment of ethical risks and their mitigation as well as a self-assessment for users of the Open Web Index. The idea of integrating ‘ethical labels’ into applications based on the Open Web Index, which Alexander Nussbauer presented, was also interesting.

Insights into new research work

Rik Viergever (Murena) presented what makes an ethical smartphone operating system and what role open source, open data and open standards play in this. Alex de Vries (Digiconomist) explained how AI is driving up the environmental costs of internet searches. Renée Ridgway, researcher at the University of Aarhus and member of the osf #EthicsInSearch group, presented her research on the values and ethics of open search infrastructure under the title ‘From Free Software to Open Source: Traversing the Valued and Ethics of Open Search Infrastructure’.

Finally, three young researchers presented new concepts for making internet search more ethical:

Daphne Auer from the Common Grounds Forum and Friedrich Schiller University Jena presented her concepts for ‘User-Driven Re-Ranking for an Adaption of the Variety in Search Results’.

Felice Douglas and Susanne Krol, both from the Stuttgart Media University, picked up on Nina Leseberg’s keynote andshared their ideas for creative ‘Curation Strategies for OpenWebSearch’.

Further information

Articles and short abstracts of the presentations by Renee Ridway (‘From Free Software to Open Source: Traversing the Valued and Ethics of Open Search Infrastructure’) and Daphne Auer (‘User-driven Re-ranking for Adapting the Veriety in Search Results’) are included in the conference proceedings.

A summary of all three days can be found on the website of the Open Search Foundation:
opensearchfoundation.org/ossym24-review

The conference proceedings can be downloaded free of charge from the conference partner CERN:
e-publishing.cern.ch/index.php/OSSYM/issue/view/172/140