Ethics

An All New Monktoberfest, Putting Society First

Trips to Portland are never complete w/o some Speckled Ax coffee to jumpstart the day & the brainIf you’ve spent any time around me in the fall, you know that my favorite conference, by far, is the annual Monktoberfest. Hosted by Redmonk every year in Portland, Maine (aka Real Portland), Monktoberfest operates at the intersection of technology and social. I like to think of it as taking craft technology, craft beer, and mixing it together to find ways to make the world a better place.

This year Stephen O’Grady took it up a notch. The 12 months since the previous Monktoberfest have been, at best, tumultuous. This is not a phenomenon of any single industry or country. It feels like the coming to head of various forces in society that is making people of all walks of life realize that they have had enough.

Seeing, and feeling, this unfold made Stephen create the most important non-technical, tech conference you need to attend.

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Apple, Privacy, and Doing the Right Thing

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Steve Jobs from a South Park episodeHere’s the deal. A Federal court has ordered Apple to comply with the FBI’s request to help break into the encrypted iPhone of one of the dead shooters from the San Bernadino shooting in California back in December. Apple publically refused in a well written letter that defended the importance of privacy and was signed by Tim Cook.

Who’s right?

It wouldn’t take a genius to determine that I might instinctively side with privacy and Tim Cook. I’m a big believer of ethical behavior in the tech world, the importance of firms protecting consumers from their own ignorance, and am proud that Tim Cook is a fellow Auburn grad.

But it isn’t that simple.

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Writings on Sexism and Other Personal Topics

Rodin's 'The Thinker'You may have noticed that I haven’t posted on the issue of Sexism or many non-IT topics of late. That is because I have moved many of those writings to Medium.

I was hoping that these musings would be more discoverable there. I also want to keep the Word a little more focused. So far the posts haven’t been discovered as much as I like. I am going to continue the experiment knowing that it may just be a matter of time.

While you can always find the posts in the link over in the sidebar, I am going to highlight a couple of my more recent posts here. Take a few moments and go read them if you haven’t already.

  • What is Wrong With You?: Why aren’t more men stepping up and at taking a stand against sexism, or any ‘isms’? This basically a rant about men standing on the sidelines. Vowing to do more BEGINS by standing-up and being counted among those who care.
  • Right or Wrong, We Need to Make This Personal: Reaching a critical mass of men who care about sexism is going to require forging an emotional connection. In this article I trace my own journey and how it became personal for me.

  • My Family Legacy, Centuries of Racism and Oppression?: During the protests in Ferguson, I watched people slowly build a new sad chapter in our nation’s history. It caused me to reflect a lot on the history of my family and how it has likely been on the wrong side of history many times.

These are important topics to me. If they weren’t, I wouldn’t share the personal stories that are located within them.

Our society is a reflection of all of us. I’d like to think we are better than the society we live in today. To make that true, we need to step up, make a difference…

And be counted.

Ethics, Facebook, and Medium

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Ghostbusters ExperimentI recently published an article on Medium on The Tech World’s Ethical Crisis. I wanted to try Medium out as a possible option for my broader topics, allowing the Word to stay a touch more focused on the industry and truly random acts of writing. It seems to have worked fairly well so it is something I will repeat.

I do want to take a moment to share why I wrote the article (which you should read before reading further). I have been reading about Facebook’s study and I saw a lot of mixed reactions. While some people were aghast, others wondered why it was a big deal at all.

That is the issue at stake here, ignorance. When unethical behavior is not recognized as such, we need to take a step back and evaluate what we hold dear in our society. When conducting human research, informed consent is such an important requirement that there are laws to enforce it. If research has a chance to cause potential harm, people need to be given a chance to say no.

I don’t believe Facebook was trying to be evil. They were ignorant of the ethics involved in what they were doing. That ignorance is a problem. They must have considered it a potential problem as they added research to the Terms of Service a few months later.

Ignorance is not an excuse and we need to start thinking about teaching people more about ethics. It has been suggested that the Venture Capitalists (VCs) should make sure that the firms they fund have training in ethics.

They should throw in a little training about sexual harassment and discrimination while you are at it.

We are all responsible for the ethics of the world in which we live. We need to take time to educate ourselves and others. We needs to talk about this at events. It needs to be part of everything we do.

Because ignorance is not an excuse for risking harm to others.

Giving Back to the Community

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New Picture (5)I wrote last fall about the ethical need for organizations to give back to the community to help those whom they disrupt. After all, if I create something that eliminates 20% of the accountants in the world, then taking some of the profit to help the community reabsorb the accountants back into society is the right thing to do.

I have always believed that one should always give back to the Community as a whole. I was a Boy Scout leader before I had kids to pass on what I had learned in Scouting. I was part of a service fraternity in college that had real, not token, requirements about participating in and leading service projects.

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Sacrificing Today for a World Tomorrow

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Last week I was at the Monktoberfest event after Cheryl McKinnon, and others, insisted that I HAD to attend. Any conference that focuses on developers, community, craft beer, and social was already appealing. When you factor in the large numbers of recommendations, I had to attend.

Monktoberfest soared above my expectations.

It was really a three events into one, and kudos to RedMonk and Steve O’Grady for putting the event together. It was a place to meet and converse with smart people in and adjacent to the Open Source ecosystem, to try some great new beers, and to hear about how technology can, and should, change the world.

One such talk, given by Alex Payne, brought up an extremely interesting topic that spurred a lot of discussions. [Note: Reconsidering Startups is now available for watching.] He questions the setup of the Silicon Valley “startup” ecosystem and how it seems that it was more of a model of disruption to help capitalists and not the world.

This raised the question, what is our ethical responsibility as “innovators”?

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Snowden, the NSA, and Ethics

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Before I get any deeper, I am not here to discuss whether or not Edward Snowden should have released the classified material. That is a debate for another day and another forum.

I am going to say that Snowden violated some of the core ethical principals of the Information Technology as a whole. It wasn’t the releasing of the PRISM slides that angers me. It is the fact that a Systems Administrator should not have been aware of the presentation in the first place.

The Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), with whom I’ve been a member longer than AIIM, has a published Code of Ethics. It is long and covers all sorts of situations in which members may find themselves. Section 1.8, Honor Confidentiality, applies to Snowden:

The principle of honesty extends to issues of confidentiality of information whenever one has made an explicit promise to honor confidentiality or, implicitly, when private information not directly related to the performance of one’s duties becomes available.

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License Audits…Enforcing Ethics

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Ethics.  In the consulting business, the perception of your level of ethics can break you.  I haven’t seen a lot people gain work because of their perceived ethics, but I have seen several lose work.  We all like to assume that the person across the table, phone, or email will act in a fair and ethical manner.  The more “real” the social interaction, the stronger the assumption.

Well, recently it appears EMC has been checking on the usage of Documentum in some clients.  Specifically, they have been conducting audits to check that licensing agreements are being followed.  This revelation just screams for comment on the event and the underlying culture.

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Fair Use and Original Thought

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The other day I was surfing some blog and found a few new Documentum blogs. Several of them had good posts that I will be commenting upon in the future. One had several good posts, and some others that sounded familiar. Then I realized, I was reading my own posts!

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