Last weekend, I represented Timetric at Science Foo Camp 2010, held at Google’s campus in California. While I was there, I gave a lightning talk about something which we’ve been thinking a lot about recently; the ethics of services like ours.
The tools we use shape how we solve the problems we face. Timetric’s designed to help you solve problems through data. So what does this mean for services like ours?
With Timetric, we aim to make it easy for you to ask questions of, and draw conclusions from, the world’s statistics. In that light, here’s the key quote:
Our tools shape the questions we ask; therefore they shape the answers we get, and therefore they shape the conclusions we draw.
This is a hard problem. Several of us at Timetric have a background in scientific research. Our products are used by journalists. Journalists and scientists have a responsibility to be honest and trustworthy. We don’t take the responsibility this places on us lightly.
Google famously coined “don’t be evil”, but it goes further than that. Your credibility, if you rely on us, depends on our credibility, which makes credibility our business. We want you to trust the conclusions you draw using Timetric. That’s why we built it. So here’s how we work, and what we promise to you:
- We’ll always publish the original source of our data directly alongside it.
- We’ll give our data the best and most helpful titles we can, and we’ll surround it with as much supplementary information as we can find, so that you can work out if it’s really the data you need.
- We won’t editorialize or fudge data. The data on Timetric is the data as we received it — all we do is transform it into Timetric’s native format and clean up any mechanical errors we find in it. What you get is the best and most transparent version of the statistics we serve that we can give you.
- We’ll keep our visualization and analysis tools as simple, as easy to use, and as transparent as we can make them.
- If you find mistakes in our data, and you tell us about them, we’ll fix them — and what’s more we’ll tell you what we did to fix them.
- When we make mistakes — as everyone does — we expect you to call us on them. We’ll discuss them openly with you, and again, once we’ve diagnosed the problems, we’ll tell you what we’re doing to fix them.
We take your integrity very seriously. So we can do that, we take our integrity very seriously. Without that commitment, no information service deserves your trust, and your trust is the most important thing you can give us. Every day, we come to work knowing we need to earn that trust, and we’re grateful that you choose to use Timetric. We won’t forget what that means.
