Mike Gerwitz

Activist for User Freedom

The Ethics Void: Join Me at LibrePlanet 2018!

2018-01-05

I got word today that I’ll be speaking again at this year’s LibrePlanet! I was going to attend even if I were not speaking, but I’m very excited to be able to continue to build off of last year’s talk and further my activism on these topics.

The title of this year’s talk is The Ethics Void. Here’s a rough abstract:

Medicine, legal, finance, journalism, scientific research—each of these fields and many others have widely adopted codes of ethics governing the lives of their professionals. Some of these codes may even be enshrined in law. And this is for good reason: these are fields that have enormous consequences.

Software and technology pervade not only through these fields, but through virtually every aspect of our lives. Yet, when compared to other fields, our community leaders and educators have produced an ethics void. Last year, I introduced numerous topics concerning #privacy, #security, and #freedom that raise serious ethical concerns. Join me this year as we consider some of those examples and others in an attempt to derive a code of ethics that compares to each of these other fields, and to consider how leaders and educators should approach ethics within education and guidance.

(My previous talks can be found on my “Talks” page.)

For this talk, I want to solicit the community at various points. I know what I want to talk about, but what are some of the most important ethical issues to you? Unfortunately there’s far too much to fit into a 40-minute talk! Feel free to send me an e-mail or reply to the thread on GNU Social.