Katrina Petersen from Trilateral Research presented work carried out within the IN-PREP project at the "Data-Power: Global In/Securities" event. The presentation focused on the ethical issues that emerge when preparing for disasters by sharing data across borders/boundaries.

1. Designing Security Across Boundaries:
mapping disperse data to collaboratively situate crises
Katrina Petersen
Trilateral Research, Ltd.
Katrina.Petersen@trilateralresearch.com
Data Power 2019

4. Wildfiretoday.com
Putting Border at Centre:
• what is at risk?
• who should be responsible for care?
• how ought care be distributed?
• what will care make better?
The answers translate different valences, functions, and
expectations of that data; culturally grounded and unstable
over time and scale (Fiore-Gartland and Neff, 2015).

5. Focus on creative activities that make the
informational infrastructures work
(Bowker & Star 2010, Karasti & Baker 2004).
‘Staying with the trouble’; working in the
‘belly of the beast’ (Balka 2006).

6. “The very introduction of data-centered technologies can both reveal
and exacerbate power relations on the ground”
(Latonero, 2015)
How data is approached and decisions taken during disasters can
“reinforce, intensify and produce new and uneven stratifications”
(Adey 2016: 42)
People need support in noticing, developing awareness, and
critically thinking about how the tools and categories have politics
(Winner, 1980; Suchman, 1993)

7. Bridge Collapse
Traffic Jam
Water
Overheating Cars
Health Concerns
Road Authorities
Police
Local Municipalities
Community Aid Groups
Paramedics
…other agencies “think in different dimensions than we do.”

8. Data inconsistencies have the
risk of being translated into
societal vulnerabilities.
(Dawes and Gharawi, 2018)
They have the ability to both
empower and disempower
actors and communities as
different data and practices with
data are included and excluded
from consideration.
(Leonelli, 2016)
(Khazai, et al. 2014)

9. Data systems and the categories upon which they function are just
approximations of the world, paying attention in specific ways
(Bowker et al. 2010)
The ability to assign value to data is not determined by the data itself but
by the ever-shifting contexts and situations of use
(Leonelli 2016)

10. “…improves our awareness of
each other, but we are not
actually interacting.”
Transboundary emergent ethics:
elaborating and encouraging dialogue
and articulation mechanisms around
the tensions that arise when IT brings
together overlapping, but not
identical, practices of risk assessment,
perspectives and voices. Becoming
data allies, not sharers.

11. Thank you.
Contact: katrina.petersen@trilateralresearch.com
The research presented here is part of the IN-PREP projects,
funded by Horizon 2020 (H2020/2014-2020), the European
Union’s Programme for Research and Innovation under grant
agreement n° 740627.