CSC 322.01, Class 09: Professional ethics, continued

Overview

• Preliminaries
  • Notes and news
  • Upcoming work
  • PSA
  • Questions
• Discussion of readings

News / Etc.

• Food!
• You will be presenting as groups on Monday. Your questions are as follows.
  • What have you accomplished in the past two weeks?
  • What are your primary goals for the next two weeks? How many points have you assigned to each goal?
  • What challenges do you anticipate or help do you need?
  • When are you planning to meet with your partners?
• Swapping 321 and 322 today. Deal.

Upcoming work

• Prep for Monday’s presentations.
• Six hours per week on your project, more or less.

Good things to do

• CS Table, Tuesday, 14 Feb 2017, noon: On Technology, Slots, and Whales.
• Thursday extras, Thursday, 16 Feb 2017, 4:15 p.m., Science 3821: 4-1 Program with UIowa.
• Women’s Basketball, Saturday at 1pm.
• Men’s Basketball, Saturday at 3pm.
• Indoor track meet.
• Large Group Speech Showcase, Saturday at 6:30 p.m.

PSA

• Note that BAC cards are available from Connie on JRC 3rd.

Questions

Discussion of readings

You read three papers

• “Arvind Narayaan and Shannon Vallor (March 2014). Why software engineering courses should include ethics coverage. Communications of the ACM 57(3): 23-25. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2566966”
• “Neil McBride (August 2012). The ethics of software engineering should be an ethics for the client. Communications of the ACM. 55(8): 39-41. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2240250”
• “Deborah G. Johnson (October 2008). Computer experts: Guns-for-hire or professionals? Communications of the ACM 51(10): 24-26. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1400190”

We will spend about 2/3 the class in groups of about four students, talking about the following questions. I will then ask each group to give a short report about their conclusions on each issue.

What do you see as the central issues raised by these papers?

What particular issues regarding ethical and professional responsibility are raised by SaaS?

• How do you deal with the “client” vs the “user” issue? To whom is your responsibility?
• Transparency: Make it clear what you are changing.
  • Transparency and the client: Make sure they understand what you are doing (as best they/you can)
  • Transparency about the data you are collecting.
• Consider broader implications. (Do we have a responsibility as developers to think about that? How will our software be used?)
• Given that you can roll out updates whatever you want, what responsiblity do you have for informing people about those updates and thinking about their effects?
• Ability to gather large amounts of data. What responsibilities does that give?
• Think about the power dynamic.
• How do you balance the different needs and perspectives of different users?
• Is SaaS itself ethical? It changes notion of ownership vs. service?

Suppose you had one day of CSC 151 to get students thinking about these issues. How would you structure that class (50 or 80 min)?

Suppose you thought we should increase the coverage of these issues in our curriculum. How would you do so?

Unforeseen consequences: The Twitter example

• Then: Look, it empowers people by allowing them to communicate and organize without government interference! (E.g., arab spring).
• Now: Look, it allow large numbers of people to attack a single person or group as well as to transmit news-like substances.