Re:Meta cuts Responsible Innovation Team
by unicornhose on Friday September 09, 2022 @01:35PM
(#32782382)
It seems that you could also see the responsible innovation team in the same light -- 'the product that ships should be innovating in a responsible way'.
Also IME none of these things are binaries -- a product could be more or less secure, privacy-respecting, and accessible, just as it could be seeking to innovate more or less responsibly. Different aspects of security, privacy, accessibility, and responsible innovation will be important at different times, depending on what's happening in the world.
The jobs are never as well-defined as you'd imagine.
The difference between these things and something like a "Responsible Innovation Team" is that the goals of the latter are often poorly defined and amorphous. What does "Responsible Innovation" really even mean? But contrast that with, for example, security goals, which are primarily "don't get breached". Security folks, privacy folks and accessibility folks should all have a very well-defined job to do. For the other "PR-focused" teams, they usually have to make work up to justify their jobs.
Note that, obviously, it's also possible to have bad security people, for example, who only see their job as to throw up roadblocks and demand that your security checklist is ever-growing. I'd even say these are the majority of "security" people. But the good security people who are able to integrate themselves successfully into your product development processes are worth their weight in gold.