We are a community-led initiative working to make ethical reflection a visible, practical, and field-specific part of complexity and network science.
Complexity science and network science increasingly shape how we study social, biological, technological, ecological, and computational systems. Yet the field still lacks shared ethical frameworks, practical guidance, and sustained spaces for community discussion.
This initiative brings researchers together to identify ethical challenges, map community needs, and develop resources grounded in the perspectives of our own field.
We began by identifying why complexity and network science need field-specific ethical reflection. Our position paper argues that the field lacks shared ethical infrastructure, guidelines, and spaces for sustained discussion.
We organize discussions, workshops, podcasts, conference sessions, and interactive activities to bring ethical questions into the everyday practice of complexity and network science.
We are collecting and analyzing community-generated material from workshops, abstracts, participatory activities, and surveys to identify recurring questions, barriers, and needs.
The group began forming through discussions at CCS 2023 in Brazil, where several of us started talking about the need for a more explicit ethics conversation within complexity science.
Since then, the initiative has grown from an initial position paper into a broader community-based project involving public discussion, participatory workshops, conference activities, and qualitative data collection.
The group began discussing the need for a dedicated ethics conversation within complexity science.
We developed a comment/perspective article on the overlooked need for ethics in complexity science.
The project expanded through the MAMMOth podcast and the Zurich workshop on ethics in complex systems.
At NetSci, we are bringing the conversation to the broader network science community through a satellite, interactive activities, a mind map, and a full-conference survey.
Our current mid-term goal is to bring the conversation together and identify community needs. We are doing this through four complementary data streams:
Workshop participants discussed ethical questions through structured jigsaw activities. We are transcribing and analyzing these discussions using Grounded Theory.
Many submitted abstracts included optional ethics paragraphs. We are analyzing these texts to understand how researchers frame ethical issues in their own work.
Satellite participants are contributing questions, comments, and ideas to a shared online board, creating a collective artifact of the community conversation.
The survey gauges community needs, interests, practices, and barriers around ethical reflection in network science and complex systems research.
Our long-term goal is to develop ethics guidelines built by our field, for our field.
Rather than importing a framework from elsewhere, we aim to build guidance that reflects the actual questions, methods, uncertainties, and responsibilities of complexity and network science. The guidelines should be grounded in community perspectives and shaped through participatory collaboration.
The initiative brings together researchers working across complexity science, network science, ethics, computational social science, and related fields.
Ana Maria de Sousa Leitão — University of Lisbon
Ana Maria Jaramillo — TU Graz and Complexity Science Hub Vienna
Enio Alterman Blay — Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil
Evelyn Panagakou — Northeastern University
Gabriele Di Bona — CNRS and Sony CSL
Paulo H. Resende — University of Campinas, Brazil
Samantha Dies — Northeastern University
Yasaman Asgari — University of Zurich