[hrpc] Resignation as HRPC co-chair

[[e-mail]]

Hi,

After approximately 4 years as the HRPC co-chair, I have decided it is time for me to  step down as co-chair.

For the most part I have enjoyed my time in the group. While I started it with my 2 collaborators, Joana and Niels, with great enthusiasm, it has not developed as I hoped it would. I hoped for a space where engineers, social scientists and advocates could work together to research and understand the issues. Instead we moved quickly to giving guidelines and considerations, sometimes seeming more like an advocacy group than the collaborative research effort I had hoped for. We have also not followed up on our recommendations to gain evidence of their value. I think we have done extremely well at forming well founded hypotheses, but also feel we have not moved much beyond that with any measured evidence of the impact of our work.

I acknowledge that this is largely my fault as a co-chair. Of late I have found myself doubting our premise, approach, and even, at times, our goals. I feel that I need to go back and rethink the problem. This is not a good attitude for a co-chair to have. As the group seems to find positive value in the work being done, the group should have co-chairs who feel the same way. I wish you all the best but do not think I am any longer the person to co-chair.

Eventually, if I can find funding, I hope to pick up a research thread within human rights and internet technology as a research topic. I will probably also focus on the techno-policy aspects of implementation and deployment rather than only the a-priori attributes of technical artifacts. I expect that this will be probably end up out of scope for the work of this group, but time will tell. I do plan to keep following the work of the RG.

I want to thank Colin and prior IRSG chairs for the opportunity to co-lead this group, to thank Mallory for the collaboration over the past few years, and to all of you for putting up with me for all these years.

Best regards,
avri