TechEthos

About the project

The TechEthos project ran from 1 January 2021 to 31 December 2023.

New and emerging technologies bring with them new ethical challenges and societal consequences. TechEthos developed guidance to ensure the highest ethical standards are adopted at the EU and international levels. In this endeavour, Ecsite members played a crucial role in understanding and further developing societal perspectives through a programme of public engagement events, in-depth dialogues, exhibitions and analyses.

Scope

TechEthos aimed to reinforce the pivotal role of the European Union as an ethics trailblazer in the area of new and emerging technologies. Such technologies brought with them new ethical challenges and societal consequences that needed to be addressed. The project developed guidance to ensure the highest ethical standards at the EU and international levels by:

• Carrying out a horizon scan of emerging technologies with high socio-economic impacts
• Identifying and analysing the ethical issues raised by a selection of such technologies
• Explorating the views and attitudes held by different stakeholders - the research community, industry, the public - towards the ethical implications of those technologies, using various tools such as scenarios and media analysis
• Developing an ethics framework and identifying what could best support the research community in integrating the ethics dimension into their research 
• Exploring and compareing the policy, legal and procedural frameworks to assess the possible need for dedicated legislation at the EU-level; and  
• Developing operational guidelines to ensure “ethics by design” and support the work of the research community, research ethics committees and integrity bodies

To do so, TechEthos engaged with researchers and innovators, research ethics committees (RECs), research integrity (RI) bodies, civil society organisations (CSOs), policy-makers and the public, to while reconcile their needs and concerns. 

Public engagement is key to the project: Ecsite and six of its members developed tools to capture societal awareness on new and emerging technologies. Science engagement organisations engaged their publics, including vulnerable groups, in exploratory events and in-depth dialogues, as well as developed light exhibitions and displays on these topics, and explored the media landscape in their countries on the selected technologies. 

TechEthos received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement no. 101006249