dotPublic Standards
The organisations that provide the information and services you rely on should hold themselves to a clear set of civic standards – the things you already expect from anyone acting in your name, even if no one has written them down before.
You should be able to feel confident that organisations won't track you. That they will tell you who runs them and who pays for them. That the information will still be available years from now. And that, if the information changes, they will tell you what has changed,
We are developing a set of technical and behavioural standards – the dotPublic Standards – which we have grouped into nine categories, each one focused on a different aspect of what it means to act in the public's interest.
Nine categories of dotPublic Standards
Accessibility – ensuring that digital products, platforms, services, and infrastructure are perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust for all people.
Accountability – ensuring that entities who create or manage digital products, platforms, services, and infrastructure can be held to account for the outcomes and impact of their decisions.
AI & Automation Disclosure – ensuring that people are made aware, at the point of use, of the presence of any digital systems acting autonomously – that any such systems operate in the public interest – and that human oversight is used when making decisions that affect people.
Interoperability – ensuring that information and services can be accessed efficiently, securely, and consistently across digital systems, without proprietary barriers or commercial lock-in.
Privacy – ensuring that people can decide if and how their personal information is collected, used, stored, and shared by digital products, platforms, services, and infrastructure.
Provenance – ensuring that the origin and history of published documents, supporting material, information, and data are clearly disclosed – including who created it, using what tools, where and when it was created, and how it has been processed or modified.
Responsibility to the Future – recognising and addressing the long-term impacts of developing and using digital systems – ensuring that they are safe, fair, and sustainable for us now and for future generations.
Security – ensuring that digital products, platforms, services, and infrastructure are protected from unauthorised access, tampering, and failure – safeguarding the integrity, availability, and resilience of systems and the data they hold.
Transparency – ensuring that people can clearly see how a digital product, platform, service, or infrastructure works – who owns and runs it, how decisions are made, what it does with the information it holds, and on whose behalf, without them needing to make a request for information.
Testing the dotPublic Standards
We are testing the dotPublic Standards through our research collaboration with Trinity College Dublin. The dotPublic research programme is based at the ADAPT Centre at Trinity College Dublin – one of Europe's leading research centres for digital media and AI.
Through the research programme we will be investigating, within several partner organisations:
- to what extent organisations already meet these standards
- what would be required to bring the rest of their work into compliance with the standards
- what additional resources or capacity that work would call for
- tools that could reduce that effort as far as possible
- whether the people who use a service notice the changes and come to value them
- whether a commitment made freely holds over the years, or quietly loosens
- whether the standards need to be enforced through a top-level domain.