The questions Ethotechnics research pursues next: where accountability, refusal, and maintenance hold or fail in systems that decide about people.
Orientation
We study where maintenance, refusal, and accountability hold, and where they fail, in sociotechnical systems that make consequential decisions about vulnerable people.
Each line asks where refusal and maintenance are recorded, so a team can intervene early without relying on heroics.
The agenda names the problems Ethotechnics studies. It focuses on accountability, refusability, and maintenance, because consequential systems fail when any of them is missing or left implicit.
Each study pairs qualitative interviews with operational diagnostics, to show where policy, tooling, and human judgment support or undermine one another. Findings become drills and diagnostics. Partners can bring their own cases for joint investigation. When a line of inquiry concludes, we publish checklists, facilitation prompts, and implementation notes that teams can adapt without a formal engagement.
Thematic pillars
Four pillars set the next studies. Each names a place where refusal, maintenance, or accountability lacks a working mechanism.
We track where responsibility concentrates, how refusal is exercised, and which governance structures protect pauses or reversals. The aim is refusal and accountability that work without heroics.
Services people depend on accumulate maintenance debt quickly. We study how teams surface gaps early, negotiate resourcing, and protect the pauses needed to stabilize a service without punishing the people who call for them.
We examine how documentation, observability, rollbacks, and training interact, and whether a safeguard survives handoffs, leadership changes, and growth in volume.
We prototype guided Q&A, scenario drills, and facilitation prompts built on large language models, so new staff can practice accountable behavior. Each prototype must respect interpretive sovereignty.