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Citizen Infrastructure

Consequence scanning

Most technology gets built around what it’s meant to do. Consequence scanning is a structured exercise for deliberately asking the other questions: what else might this do, who might it affect, and what will we do about the consequences we don’t want? Developed by the UK think tank Doteveryone (and now stewarded by TechTransformed), it is a lightweight, repeatable practice designed to drop into an existing product or policy process rather than bolt on a one-off “ethics review.”

The three questions

Section titled “The three questions”

A consequence-scanning session gathers the people building something and works through three deceptively simple prompts:

  1. What are the intended and unintended consequences of this product or feature?
  2. What are the consequences we want — and how do we amplify them?
  3. What are the consequences we don’t want — and how do we mitigate, prevent, or at least monitor them?

Consequences get sorted into what the team can act on now, what to influence or watch, and what is simply acknowledged as a known risk. The point isn’t to predict the future perfectly; it’s to surface the obvious-in-hindsight harms early, while there’s still time and cheap room to change course, and to leave a record of what the team chose to do about each one.

Why it matters for citizen infrastructure

Section titled “Why it matters for citizen infrastructure”

Consequence scanning is a small but load-bearing piece of how communities can hold technology to account. In Manchester’s People’s Panel for AI, it is the structured technique residents use to interrogate the public-sector AI use-cases put in front of them: a service lead pitches a system, and the panel scans it for unintended effects, especially on the digitally-excluded communities the panellists are drawn from. That turns an abstract worry (“is this AI fair?”) into a concrete, answerable agenda. Because it is documented and reusable, it travels well, the same property that makes a good reusable governance template more valuable than a clever one-off, and it pairs naturally with the civic oversight of AI more broadly.

Sources

Section titled “Sources”
  • Consequence Scanning — an agile practice for responsible innovators — Doteveryone / TechTransformed: tech-transformed.com