--- title: Eboard 09 Professional ethics, continued number: 9 section: eboards held: 2017-02-10 --- 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. " * "Neil McBride (August 2012). The ethics of software engineering should be an ethics for the client. _Communications of the ACM_. 55(8): 39-41. " * "Deborah G. Johnson (October 2008). Computer experts: Guns-for-hire or professionals? _Communications of the ACM_ 51(10): 24-26. " 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.