Launching Unpath’d Waters’ Living Values: What does it mean to create values for a research project?

These values will help the project act purposefully and responsively by giving us a shared vision and keeping us accountable to our audiences, partners, and funders.

Creating values is pretty common in different organisations, but talking about how we develop them is more unusual. So, we thought we’d take this opportunity to describe how we identified our values and got consensus on how to prioritise them.

Why create values?

Unpath’d Waters works at a huge scale, with dozens of collaborators, scores of collections and datasets, and thousands of potential people who will use our products. There will inevitably be conflicting ideas about why we are doing this work and who we are doing it for.

Creating values is one well-recognised way of focusing efforts and guiding decision-making when faced with challenges. A values-based approach is especially common when designing new digital systems and outputs, as seen in the work of Katie Shilton or the vast scholarship on value-sensitive design.

We also know that projects can change over time. Therefore, ours are ‘living’ values, meaning that as the Unpath’d Waters project grows and changes, so too may we grow and update our values to ensure they stay aligned and relevant.

Agreeing the framework

We started by looking at the experiences of other collaborative and ambitious initiatives, (like One Ocean Hub, Versed Education, D’Ignazio and Klein 2020, Digital Culture Charter). Based on these, we committed to embedding values at the core of Unpath’d Waters.

We recognised that our project’s values might differ from our personal values, the values of others and traditional ‘heritage values’ (like Historic England’s Conservation Principles). After all, values are unique and context specific. They may be social, emotional, moral or environmental goals – things we care about and strive to achieve (following the definitions of Katie Shilton and Benjamin Fish & Luke Stark).

In light of these complexities, we proposed a four-part method for setting project values (Figure 1). We presented this method to the full Unpath’d Waters consortium, as well as to representatives of the other Towards a National Collection Discovery Projects. We used their constructive feedback to help refine the process.

Identifying the values

We organised a workshop with the Unpath’d Waters management team and MOLA (who are leading this work with the support of Project Officer Dr Katrina Foxton). We divided into three small groups with instructions on how to ‘bring to the surface’ the values that we felt were important to the project. We then asked each group to pitch their values to the other workshop participants.

After the pitches, we challenged each proposed value by exposing them to a series of critical questions (Figure 2). This deliberate challenging followed the model of previous projects, including EMOTIVE, and built on the scholarship of Dolcetti and colleagues. The values that stood up to our challenges were then added to a draft list.

We agreed from the outset that one value – equity – must appear amongst our values. Not only that, we quickly discovered it was relatively simple to agree on all the values because our ideas converged around a series of points, which we were able to group together into six main topics.

As part of our commitment to “connect with people on their own terms,” we used the exact words spoken by our team members to draft six project values. Then, inspired by Nassim JafariNaimi and colleagues’ concept of values as hypotheses, we challenged the values again.

We did this by asking everyone on the project (close to 50 people) to answer critical questions about at least one of the values (for an example see Figure 3). We sent out the questions via Google Forms, alongside a report on how we drafted the values. We also included a document explaining the purpose of the questions and examples of responses if they felt unfamiliar with the process.

Dozens of people replied, which led us to do some final tweaking to make them more representative of the group. These values represent our first release, and are now published on our About page.

How do we keep our values alive?

Research suggests that values evolve as we are confronted with different situations and learn by navigating through them. The Unpath’d Waters team has a clear strategy in mind to make sure we respect the ‘lively’ nature of our values.

First, we will set measures to hold ourselves accountable to our values. These measures will be developed throughout the summer of 2022, then next year we will assess our performance against the values.

Second, as we begin to work closely with our audiences over the coming year, we will encourage them to scrutinise our values. This could mean revising or adding to them (and their associated measures) based on people’s experiences.

Stay tuned for updates on our activities and, in the meantime, thank you for reading and honouring our values as you interact with Unpath’d Waters!