GA in Vienna: Fine-tuning the Ethics Framework and impact pathways

On 1 and 2 June 2023, the PRO-Ethics consortium and members of the advisory board met in Vienna for their last physical general assembly meeting. The event focused on fine-tuning the design and contents of the Ethics Framework as well as the impact pathways and overall measures towards sustainability of the project undertaken by the consortium partners.

The first block of the meeting, ‘Pilot Impact Pathways’ was a continuation of the training provided by Innoviris on results integration and sustainability of the pilots and overall project. Building on the Theory of Change model, each partner further developed their schemes to achieve and assess the impact of their pilot activities on their organisations and the broader (stakeholder) community. During the feedback sessions, partners also discussed other potentially beneficial models for impact assessment, and there was a general agreement that the Theory of Change is a good instrument for measuring the impact of the pilots. An important discussion point involved also considering the outcomes of the pilots as an impact of the whole PRO-Ethics project, rather than focusing only on the use of the Ethics Framework as the main outcome of the project.

The third and fourth sessions, stretched over two days, focused on the design, development and promotion of the Ethics Framework and Guidelines. In order to make this core scientific output more actionable and appealing to its future users, the partners decided to engage a science communication company for designing and editing the document. During these sessions, the partners provided feedback on some initial design concepts and agreed on the final branding, structure and further visualization aspects of the final document. This was followed by interactive group work, where the partners developed exemplary use-cases building on the experiences made in their pilot stories. These use-cases sketched out concrete activities, their involved stakeholders, and drafted a chronology of decisions to be undertaken in their implementation. All of this was tied to the Ethics Framework and Guidelines, laying the groundwork for the development of training materials which can be useful both for holding interactive training sessions and for providing supplementary documentation with the Framework.

With the aim of dissemination in mind, the consortium also discussed the plan and further organisational aspects of the national embedding events and the final conference. The latter will be organised in cooperation with the COESO project in Paris, between 19. and 21. October 2023. A save-the-date and official invitation will soon be sent to the community of stakeholders by both project consortia.

Finally, during the last session of the second day, ZSI initiated a short reflection on the use of the various IT tools utilized in the project to gain a better understanding of the practicalities of online engagement of various stakeholder groups.

In parallel to each of these sessions, interviews with individual project team members were held to develop a professionally produced film on the project and its results. This film will be shown at the final conference, before being broadly disseminated by the project partners with the final Ethics Framework and Guidelines.


By ZSI
Photos from the General Assembly: PRO-Ethics
Published: 19.06.2023