Our activities bring ethical reflection into the spaces where complexity and network science communities already meet: conferences, workshops, podcasts, surveys, and participatory discussions.
Some activities are designed to facilitate conversation. Others also generate community-based material that we analyze to identify shared ethical questions, practical barriers, and needs for future guidelines.
We use talks, podcasts, and conference sessions to make ethical questions more visible within complexity and network science.
We design workshops and interactive activities where participants can discuss concrete ethical questions from their own research contexts.
We collect and analyze community-generated material, including workshop transcripts, abstracts, mind maps, and survey responses.
The initiative began through informal discussions at CCS 2023 in Brazil, where members of the group started reflecting on the need for a more explicit ethics conversation within complexity science.
These early conversations helped shape the project’s direction: moving from a general concern about ethics in the field toward a collaborative initiative focused on community needs, field-specific questions, and practical guidelines.
Our first major output was a position paper arguing that complexity science needs more sustained ethical reflection, shared resources, and field-specific guidance.
The paper helped define the motivation for the initiative and served as a starting point for broader conversations with the complexity and network science communities.
The MAMMOth podcast created a public-facing space to discuss why ethics matters for complexity science and how the field might begin developing its own ethical conversations and resources.
The Zurich workshop brought together researchers to discuss ethical questions in complex systems research through talks, discussion, and participatory activities.
A central part of the workshop was a jigsaw activity built around concrete themes such as emergence, epidemics, and large language models. The activity generated discussion material that is being transcribed and analyzed using Grounded Theory.
As part of the broader project, we are analyzing submitted abstracts and optional ethics paragraphs from NetSciX. These texts provide a view into how researchers in network science and complex systems describe ethical questions, responsibilities, risks, and uncertainties in their own work.
We are using qualitative methods, including Grounded Theory, to identify recurring themes.
The NetSci 2026 satellite, “Ethics in Network Science Research & Practice,” brings the ethics conversation to the broader network science community.
The satellite includes keynote talks, lightning talks, interactive activities, a panel discussion, and participatory discussion around shared ethical questions and community needs.
The NetSci survey asks researchers how they encounter ethical questions in their work, what practices they use, what barriers they face, and what kinds of guidance or examples would be useful for the field.
The survey is anonymous, voluntary, and designed to help identify community needs and priorities.
Together, these activities support the initiative’s mid-term goal: bringing the conversation together and identifying community needs.
The longer-term goal is to develop ethics guidelines built by the field, for the field — grounded in the perspectives of complexity and network science researchers and shaped through participatory collaboration.