The virtuous smart city : Bridging the gap between ethical principles and practices of data-driven innovation
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Journal Title
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Volume Title
A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä
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Author
Date
2023-05-01
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Mcode
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Language
en
Pages
11
1-11
1-11
Series
Data & Policy, Volume 5
Abstract
For smart cities, data-driven innovation promises societal benefits and increased well-being for residents and visitors. At the same time, the deployment of data-driven innovation poses significant ethical challenges. Although cities and other public-sector actors have increasingly adopted ethical principles, employing them in practice remains challenging. In this commentary, we use a virtue-based approach that bridges the gap between abstract principles and the daily work of practitioners who engage in and with data-driven innovation processes. Inspired by Aristotle, we describe practices of data-driven innovation in a smart city applying the concepts of virtue and phronêsis, meaning good judgment of and sensitivity to ethical issues. We use a dialogic case-study approach to study two cases of data-driven innovation in the city of Helsinki. We then describe as an illustration of how our approach can help bridge the gap between concrete practices of data-driven innovation and high-level principles. Overall, we advance a theoretically grounded, virtue-based approach, which is practice oriented and linked to the daily work of data scientists and other practitioners of data-driven innovation. Further, this approach helps understand the need for and importance of individual application of phronêsis, which is particularly important in public-sector organizations that can experience gaps between principle and practice. This importance is further intensified in cases of data-driven innovation in which, by definition, novel and unknown contexts are explored.Description
Publisher Copyright: © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press.
Keywords
AI ethics, data policy, data-driven innovation, smart city, virtue ethics
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Citation
Lähteenoja , V & Karhu , K 2023 , ' The virtuous smart city : Bridging the gap between ethical principles and practices of data-driven innovation ' , Data & Policy , vol. 5 , e15 , pp. 1-11 . https://doi.org/10.1017/dap.2023.9
