Computer-supported ethical rules for collaboratively sharing data

Rapid response to pressing societal and business challenges requires consortia joining forces to focus their resources including specialist skills, knowledge, methods and data. The formation and maintenance of the required collaborations depends on rules that cover ethical, legal, privacy and business issues. As complexity and scale grow, maintaining compliance and understanding becomes very difficult. This pushes collaborations to polarized extremes, everything public or everything private. We propose that computer support for rules will ease the burden on the people and enable more sophisticated forms of collaborations. This requires a (semi-)automated framework incorporating diverse stakeholders to shape the rules, govern their interpretation, and deliver unbiased diagnosis and mitigation of conflicts. Its robust depends on formalisation of rules crossing organisational and technical boundaries, enabling automatic composition and modification of rules propagated through multi-input-multi-output cross-boundary data flows. This requires a research campaign with sufficiently diverse contributors. We report two case studies to clarify requirements, and then reshape the requirements for building the framework. Our early prototype suggests a direction for that research. This will underpin future systems supporting agile, extensive and sustainable collaborations.