Values interventions: Ethics scholarship in action

Abstract

The Internet has permeated the economic, political, cultural and social domains of global society and transformed the way in which we present and transmit knowledge. The infrastructure underlying the Internet continues to evolve, with ramifications for not only the technical protocols that govern the way the Internet functions, but also implications for social, economic, and legal issues. Internet protocols affect debates about intellectual property, privacy, security, and information access. What values (e.g. privacy, trust, security, equity, transparency, etc.) are embedded in our current Internet architecture, and what will be considered in the design of future Internet architectures? This panel describes an ongoing project to put ethics scholarship in action: a values intervention into the design of future Internet architectures. Panelists from the NSF-funded Future Internet Architecture Values in Design Council will speak about the effort to introduce social and ethical discussion into technical design practice, and the methods and challenges of such values interventions.