Move forward or break ranks:Workshopping re-idealized explanation obligations to foster fundamental change and resistance to oppression

This paper presents a set of ‘duties of care’ that can be used to guide decision and explanation processes in complex socio-technical-legal environments. The duties support and strengthen existing explanation laws across legal domains. Informed by critical legal, philosophical, and technological insights, the model supports the conscientious challenges of decision makers and explainers who wish to avoid complicity in orchestrated harms. The duties support them and anyone working on fair decision making to tease out their knowledge-and-information needs and whether these are organized for, and which knowledge/deficits should raise alarm and are cause for resistance. The model was workshopped in two public agencies to test its ‘fit’ and usefulness in this salient decision-making sphere. This paper reports on the first impressions of what it takes to bring fundamental research directly into a practice context, and offers the workshop design to anyone interested to use in their own work. 1