Councils
Industry councils
Councils are formation, research and collaboration bodies. They are not lobbying fronts, they do not represent VOG politically, and membership guarantees nobody an appointment.
Why councils
Formation that stays generic does not survive contact with an actual industry. The ethical questions facing a hospital director, a credit risk officer and a games studio founder are not the same questions, and treating them as the same produces leaders who can recite principles and cannot apply them.
Councils exist so that formation happens with people who understand the specific pressures of a domain, and so that the questions worth answering get written down and studied rather than repeated in conversation.
The ten priority domains
Technology and artificial intelligence
Finance
Education
Health
Media
Agriculture
Energy
Law and public policy
Real estate and infrastructure
Creative industries
What a council does
- Forms the people in its domain, through peer learning and applied case work.
- Produces published research and practical guidance on the domain's real ethical questions.
- Enables collaboration between people facing the same problems in different organisations.
- Feeds what it learns back into the formation curriculum.
What a council is not
Membership and conflicts
Council members will declare relevant commercial interests, and those interests are recorded. A member does not participate in a decision affecting an organisation they are connected to. Research published by a council will disclose its funding and any interests held by its authors.
Launch sequence
We will not open ten councils at once. Councils open where we have the faculty, the participants and the research capacity to run them properly, and we will say which ones those are as they launch rather than announcing all ten and delivering two.
Offer your expertise