Michael Zimmer.org

I have been charged with convening a panel for the Information Ethics special interest group of ALISE (Association for Library and Information Science Education), to be held at its 2011 annual conference.
I’ve decided to focus on how LIS scholars and professionals need to place renewed focus on providing information ethics education across various contexts. We must move beyond just implementing information ethics within LIS curricula, and find innovative ways to incorporate it into elementary and secondary schools, public & school libraries, homes and community centers, as well as within popular …

Registration is now open for Internet Research 11.0: Sustainability, Participation, Action, the 2010 conference for the Association of Internet Researchers, taking place October 21-23 in Gothenburg, Sweden.

And, if you’re a student looking for ways to defray some of the costs, the UW-Milwaukee Center for Information Policy Research (CIPR) will again sponsor a student (undergraduate, graduate or post-doc) for the conference in the amount of US$800.

I’m thrilled to announce that the School of Information Studies and the Center for Information Policy Research at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee will be hosting the 2011 Computer Ethics/Philosophical Enquiry (CEPE) conference, May 31 to June 3, 2011. The bi-annual conference is presented by the International Society for Ethics and Information Technology (INSEIT), and this will my 4th time participating in CEPE (2005, 2007, 2009).
For 2011, the conference theme is “Crossing Boundaries: Ethics in Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Relations”. The full call for papers is below.
Call for …

Please join us for the UW-Milwaukee Center for International Education’s 2010 conference, “Law and Disciplinarity: Thinking Beyond Borders,” which will take place on April 23-24 at UWM’s Hefter Conference Center. Registration is free and open to the public.
Law and Disciplinarity: Thinking Beyond Borders
Hefter Conference Center
3271 N. Lake Drive
University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
April 23-24 2010
In the twenty-first century, traditional legal borders – geographic and intellectual – have been increasingly contested. Many observers have questioned whether the long-held conception of sovereign state boundary remains salient in a world of technology-accelerated trans-boundary flows of people, …

If you have an interest in information ethics, access to knowledge, capacity building, and the African continent, please join us for the “Teaching Information Ethics in Africa – Current Status, Opportunities, and Challenges” conference at the University of Botswana on September 6-7, 2010.
This event is the third of a series of conferences focusing on information ethics in Africa. The first, “African Information Ethics Conference: Ethical Challenges in the Information Age” convened in 2007, was the first ever African conference on information ethics. This was followed in 2009 by “The Workshop …

The Special Interest Group on International Information Issues (SIG-III) of the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) is pleased to announce its eleventh competition for papers to be submitted for the 2010 Annual Meeting, which will take place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 22-27, 2010. (http://www.asis.org/Conferences/AM10/am10cfp.html)
Building from the overall conference theme, the theme for this year’s paper contest is: “Navigating Streams in a Global Information Ecosystem“.
Papers could discuss issues, policies and case studies on specific aspects of the theme from a global and/or international perspective. Topics include, but are …

From May 2 through May 8, 2010, libraries across the nation will celebrate Choose Privacy Week for the first time. This American Library Association campaign invites library professionals, users, and friends into a national conversation about privacy rights in a digital age. The UWM School of Information Studies and UWM Libraries have joined together to provide a venue for local librarians, information professionals, and patrons to discuss the emerging privacy and ethical challenges for libraries in the new “2.0” era, titled:
Emerging Privacy and Ethical Challenges for Libraries in the 2.0 …

This weekend I’m attending the 4th Access to Knowledge conference, A2K4: Access to Knowledge and Human Rights, hosted by the Yale Information Society Project (see my original post on the conference here).

With the help of the UW-Milwaukee School of Information Studies, I organized a workshop on “Identifying Challenges and Opportunities foran African Information Ethics”, featuring Johannes Britz (School of Information Studies, UW-Milwaukee), Rafael Capurro (International Center for Information Ethics, and School of Information Studies, UW-Milwaukee) and Dennis Ocholla (University of Zululand), along with a very engaged group of conference participants.

I’m currently in Savannah, GA to participate in a workshop on Revisiting Research Ethics in the Facebook Era: Challenges in Emerging CSCW Research at CSCW 2010.
This is my first time at CSCW, and looking at the set of papers for this workshop, it should be an excellent experience. I’ve submitted a brief analysis of the “Tastes, Ties, and Time” Facebook dataset release (my larger paper is going through its final edits for publication). You can download the short analysis here: Subject Privacy and the Release of the “Tastes, …

I am proposing a panel for Internet Research 11.0 titled “On the Philosophy of Facebook”. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has built his social networking empire on the belief that “information wants to be shared”, a particular philosophy of information that directly impacts the values built into the design of Facebook, ranging from its user interface, privacy policies, terms of service, and method of governance. This panel will explore the philosophy of Facebook and its broader implications for norms of privacy, identity, governance, sociability, and online life generally.

The Yale Information Society Project has announced the 4th Access to Knowledge conference: A2K4: Access to Knowledge and Human Rights. The event will be held at Yale Law School on February 12-13, 2010, hosted by the Information Society Project, in collaboration with an extensive list of organizing partners, including UW-Milwaukee School of Information Studies.
The two-day conference will feature plenary panels as well as breakout sessions of working groups organized around specific issue areas, including a workshop I have organized on “Identifying Challenges and Opportunities for an African Information Ethics”.

On Tuesday, a group of librarians and information professions will be holding a panel discussion on “The Challenges of Implementing Library 2.0 Services” at the 2009 annual meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T).
On the Challenges of Implementing Library 2.0 Services
ASIS&T 2009 Annual Meeting
Tuesday, Nov. 10, 3:30pm PST
Today, many libraries are at a crossroads: several of the services they have traditionally provided within their walls are increasingly made available online, often by non-library, commercial entities. For example, Web search engines provide easy access to millions of …

Speaking of conferences in November that I am unable to attend, Geert Lovink and Shirley Niemans at the Institute of Network Cultures have organized the Society of the Query conference, November 13-14 in Amsterdam. With the tagline “Stop Searching, Start Questioning!”, this event hopes to critically reflect on the information society and the dominant role of the search engine in our culture:
This two-day Query conference aims to examine the key issues that are emerging around web search, and to contextualize developments within the fields of knowledge organization and information design. …

When I edited a special volume of First Monday on “Critical Perspectives of Web 2.0” I was lucky to have included a contribution by Trebor Scholz, which made an already good collection of papers even better. Scholz’s article, “Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0“, argued that the very notion of “Web 2.0″ represents not a unique socio–technological advance in the World Wide Web, but rather a powerful “framing device of professional elites that define what enters the public discourse about the impact of the Web on society,” resulting …

Next week, October 19 – 23, 2009, will mark the first international Open Access Week, celebrating the international movement working to “throw open the locked doors that once hid knowledge.” Encouraging the unrestricted sharing of scholarly and scientific research, the Open Access movement is gaining ever more momentum around the world as growing numbers of research funders, faculties, and libraries are committed to making research available free of charge and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Open Access Week is an opportunity to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access …