The Ethical Young Professional
What would you do as a young professional if you were asked to do something that was clearly unethical at work? Even more challenging is when ethical challenges are more subtle. How would you respond to such a situation? As GIS becomes increasingly tied to Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, complex models, and increasingly large staffs spread out among many workplaces and organizations, and as the data from GIS becomes increasingly in demand and used in society, ethics in GIS are becoming more of a daily consideration.
How can you think about ethics in your GIS work?
Practice Ethics in Mapmaking
Maps have always been powerful means of communication, whether in the past etched in cave walls, stone, wood, or silver, or, later, onto copper plates, film, and in our own time, in digital form. Maps are everywhere—on our phones, computers, fitness apps, and news media, communicating in a myriad of ways about changes over space and time and covering scales from local to global, even beyond our Earth to other planetary bodies. For centuries, creating maps that were used for science, research, and exploration was a tradecraft that only a select few in society had the skill and the position in which to engage.
Today, each of you in the YPN community is not only a map consumer, but you are also a map creator. Each step that you work through in a GIS, from the collection of data for those maps, to projecting, classifying, symbolizing, and communicating results, is laden with meaning. Underlying those decisions are ethical choices and considerations.
The YPN community has superpowers—modern GIS at your fingertips to share maps with hundreds or even millions of people instantly. Thus it is critical that ethics be considered as you journey forward in the professional world. In so doing, you and others gain confidence that you are making the wisest decisions possible.
5 ethical considerations to make in your GIS work
1) First, the rise of powerful, web-based GIS brought maps to everyone, everywhere as never before in history. Be thankful that you have arrived in the GIS community at this time with easy-to-configure tools at your fingertips, rather than having to deal with past laborious processes of gathering, storing, formatting, and projecting data with slow computers with unwieldy graphics cards. But given that you can make a map and do spatial analysis in minutes, it is critical that you do not rush the process by simply “clicking through”, without considering the questions you are asking the quality of the data and models you choose to use.
2) Web GIS has brought a renewed interest in citizen science, or community science, where people from all life paths gather data on birds, noise, trails, weather, historical sites, and other phenomena from the physical and cultural environment.
3) Awareness of the societal implications of making decisions using technology is rapidly rising. People are mindful that technology and research are not completely objective—GIS workflows, tools, and the data are all products of people’s worldview and background.
4) GIS is increasingly bound to and supplied by information from big data streams, artificial intelligence, and models that the GIS analyst did not create themselves. Do you understand the inputs to all of the models and data that you are using in your project?
5) Despite the plethora of maps in our world, maps still have an aura of authenticity–they tend to be believed. Thus the YPN GIS professional has perhaps an even greater responsibility than those creating other types of data in ensuring that their results are not intentionally or unintentionally misleading—that they are clearly communicating, inspiring, and useful.
Raise Geo-Ethics Awareness in the Workplace
One way of raising ethical awareness and knowledge in the workforce is to embed these concepts in workplaces, including organizations that focus on health, planning, engineering, business, transportation, and in other areas in which the “where” question is being asked. The same GIS tools and workflows that enable mapped data to be created in the first place can be used to foster workplace discussions about ethics. I also believe that raising awareness of the ethics of GIS in your workplace is a key way in which you in the YPN community can demonstrate leadership.
Aligned with Diana Sinton’s view that ethics is too important to be relegated a topic for the end of a university course, I believe that ethics must be integrated throughout an organization’s normal workflow, from science to supply chain management. Many of the ways I describe in this article can be effectively used for a wide spectrum of citizens and community leaders.
One way you can explore ethical concerns and help others to do so is through an ongoing series of essays about being critical of mapped data. Stemming from a book entitled GIS and Public Domain Data that Jill Clark and I authored for Esri Press, these include: Always thoughtfully consider the class breaks, symbology, projection, source, curation, lineage, and other metadata with maps you create. Furthermore, examine these same elements in maps you consume (even those that you post about on social media!).
Maps and stories that are shared as fun posts can serve as good conversation starters with colleagues. These include the story of the SS Warrimoo, a ship that supposedly was simultaneously in two different days, months, years, seasons, and centuries in 1899. Was this really the case? Interesting, but it needs to be viewed as critically as more “serious” articles are. Consider the account of a person who wheeled 100 cell phones around Berlin in a little red wagon. The phones submitted their over-land slow speeds to a mapping service, causing Google Maps to show traffic jams in the local area. Was the wagon information “fake data”, was the mapping service performing as designed, or was it both fake and real? Are maps of the “favorite food in every state” also unethical when there is no mention of how high (or low) the sample size was? Not that “fun maps” do not have their place, but we should treat them critically as well, or else it will be challenging for us to know how to treat a map of a more serious issue where the N value may be very low or unstated. One of the most effective ways of grappling with these topics is to examine examples of “bad maps”, such as my set here. What makes a map “bad”? Erroneous, misleading, and just plain ugly maps abound.
Maps are Representations of Reality
Even data in today’s useful libraries such as the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World and data portals spanning multiple themes and scales need to be viewed critically. Maps are representations of reality—very useful representations, but they all have standards of quality, dates, scales, curation frequency, and rules. Even live IoT data feeds can be erroneous, as I illustrate in this weather feed where the data are off the scale—even if you were on Mercury! Even the term “digital twin” needs to be said with caution—a “twin” as a GIS representation of reality is not a perfect representation.
Imagery from satellites, UAVs, and aircraft may be even more susceptible to being viewed as “truth” as imagery abounds (including do-it-yourself drone imagery). Images have distortions and mapping tolerances; they could be intentionally offset from vectors or selectively remove specific items, such as moving vehicles. They could even be intentionally faked.
Despite the plethora of metadata tools, important information may be left out of data documentation. Some web mapping applications can be created with very little or no metadata whatsoever. Sometimes, such information gaps can only be resolved by talking to the data creator with an old fashioned phone call or Zoom session, as was the case where declining Lyme disease rates looked “too good to be true” as in my Lyme disease study. Cultivate the habit of being critical of data that you collect, as I point out in these field work examples.
Ethics When using Multimedia
When creating multimedia dashboards, infographics, or storymaps, ask yourself: “Can I use that picture?” as you consider the use of copyrighted images. Establish a best practice for your organization, aided by this useful decision-making graphic. Next, “Should I use that picture?” Potential harm can occur to natural spaces, from geotagged photographs resulting in a place being “over-loved” or to endangered species.
Gloria Origgi, states that “We are experiencing a fundamental paradigm shift from the ‘information age’ towards the ‘reputation age’, in which information will have value only if it is already filtered, evaluated and commented upon by others. Seen in this light, reputation has become a central pillar of collective intelligence today.” How can we trust a geospatial data set? Do we determine its “fitness for use” by the reputation of its author, organization, or metadata, or is it on the number of views or “likes?” Consider the rise of company reputation as a major influence on decision making; use my essay on company ethics and on reputation and geographic information.
Another way to embed ethics is to refer to the GIS Certification Institute’s Code of Ethics: Obligations to society, to employers and funders, to colleagues and the profession, and to individuals. The COVID-19 situation and explosion of health-related geospatial data presented an unprecedented expansion of ties between GIS and ethics, but also presented its own privacy and ethical concerns.
Real-world scenarios are perhaps the most powerful way to keep current about ethics: Ask yourself and coworkers, “when does the obligation to society outweigh the obligation to the employer, funder, or colleagues?” Many intriguing cases can be found in the GIS Professional Ethics Project. Another a series of intriguing videos on geoprivacy, including an interview with “repo-man”, a driver who collects license plate data via cameras on his car hood to identify possible stolen vehicles to be repossessed.
The Mapmakers Mantra and Other Resources
I also encourage the consideration of new codes of ethics and related resources: The Mapmaker’s Mantra, authored by my Esri colleagues, including: Be honest and accurate, be transparent and accountable, minimize harm and seek to provide value, and be humble and courageous. The American Geographical Society’s EthicalGeo column provides thoughtful essays and a Locus Charter set of guidelines.
As GIS expands into an ever-widening array of disciplines and applications, new ethical considerations arise. Esri’s social science collaborative showcases the collaborative power and utility of ArcGIS for both quantitative and qualitative social science research. The American Association of Geographers worked with universities, Esri, and other partners to produce an online seminar series and papers on the issues and imperatives for responsible use of locational data in the public interest. I was proud to be a part of this effort, culminating in a summit in Santa Barbara, a substantive report that we seek feedback on, a research agenda, and other guidance.
Sample of images from the ethics resources described in this article. Fostering an awareness of the intertwining of ethics and GIS can be effectively and engagingly accomplished using these resources.
Sample of images from the ethics resources described in this article. Fostering an awareness of the intertwining of ethics and GIS can be effectively and engagingly accomplished using these resources.
I trust that these resources and approaches encourage the YPN community to take the responsibility of creating maps seriously. I provide some of this content in story map form. Although modern maps can be created in a matter of minutes, it is my hope that these approaches will encourage you as change agents in society work in a thoughtful, ethical, and reflective manner.