Reading, discussion, source suggestion, or event attendance.
E Research ethics
Participation is not a blank check.
Community activity, research contact, informed consent, quotation, archiving, and public release are separate permissions with different risks.
CollectionPre-fieldworkprotocol before data
Current boundary
The site is not yet conducting a published interview study.
Unprogrammable.org does not operate a local interview or contribution intake form. An outbound ecosystem contact is not research enrollment, recording consent, or publication permission.
Before interviews or oral histories begin, the project needs a study-specific consent process, retention plan, researcher-role disclosure, risk review, and a decision about whether institutional ethics review is required or available. The site will not imply institutional approval that has not occurred.
Separate decisions
Research data
Raw records do not belong in the public publishing tree.
No contribution records are stored by this public site. Future raw interview files, consent records, transcripts under review, and sensitive metadata should remain in a separately protected research system with access limited to authorized personnel.
The project does not automatically send participant material to external AI, transcription, analytics, or cloud-processing services. Any future external processing needs an explicit policy, reviewed necessity, and appropriate permission.
No inferred sensitive traits
Do not infer political ideology, health, race, religion, sexuality, or other sensitive characteristics from browsing behavior or public profiles.
No unnecessary location detail
Precise participant locations should not be collected or published merely for completeness.
Context matters
Publicly accessible information can still create ethical concerns depending on vulnerability, expectations, identifiability, and downstream use.
External inputs
Oral History Association
The project uses OHA ethics and best-practice materials as inputs on informed consent, narrator review, preservation, access, and responsible promises.
OHA Statement on Ethics ↗Association of Internet Researchers
AoIR’s ethics resources are an input for context-sensitive decisions about internet research, privacy, risk, and researcher responsibility.
AoIR ethics resources ↗No endorsement implied. Linking to professional guidance does not mean either organization has reviewed or approved this project.