Michael Zimmer.org

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.

Speaking of the research ethics related to automatically harvesting public social networking data, we are confronted this week with the story of Pete Warden, a former Apple engineer who has spent the last six months harvesting and analyzing data from some 215 million public Facebook profile pages.
According to Warden, he exploited a flaw in Facebook’s architecture to access public profiles without needing to be signed in to a Facebook account, effectively avoiding being bound by Facebook’s Terms of Service preventing such automated harvesting of data. As a result, he amassed …

While participating in the workshop on Revisiting Research Ethics in the Facebook Era: Challenges in Emerging CSCW Research, the question arose as to whether it was ethical for researchers to follow and systematically capture public Twitter streams without first obtaining specific, informed consent by the subjects. Many in the room felt that consent was not necessary since the tweets are public, a conscious choice made by the user to allow the whole world see her activity. In short, by not restricting …

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, …

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 …

I’m pleased to announce that Dr. Rafael Capurro, an international expert in information ethics, is joining the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Information Studies as a Distinguished Researcher. Dr. Capurro’s focus on intercultural information ethics — as well as his sense of humor — will be a welcome addition to our growing team of researchers.
From the press release:
As founder and director of the International Center for Information Ethics, Dr. Capurro is world-renowned for his work in ethics and information policy. He holds a doctorate in philosophy from Düsseldorf University, a …

On the heels of Open Access Day at UW-Milwaukee, held as part of the first international Open Access Week, it was announced that the UWM Libraries has successfully negotiated a contract with the Elsevier publishing company that will provide increased access to scholarly journals and reduce costs to UWM.
From the announcement sent by Rita Cheng, Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs:
Library patrons will have access to ScienceDirect, a database providing access to 2,000 full text peer-reviewed journals, with content going back to 1995, published by Elsevier and its partners.   …

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 …

For the last 353 days, I’ve been part of a team planning Internet Research 10.0 – Internet: Critical, the 10th annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR). My life is about to get back to normal, as an interdisciplinary collection of nearly 400 scholars, researchers and graduate students interested in Internet and new media studies are descending on Milwaukee this week.
The conference program is fantastic, featuring keynote addresses by Siva Vaidhyanathan, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, and Megan Boler. I’ll be presenting an updated version of my paper, “But …

Congratulations to Elizabeth Buchanan and Charles Ess for being awarded an NSF grant to create a much-needed repository and advisory board to address the challenges that emerging Internet and Web 2.0 platforms are placing on research ethics.
I’m thrilled to be among the senior personnel on this grant, and look forward to the collaboration and results.
[Note: The Internet Research Ethics Digital Library, Resource Center, and Commons website is now live]
Here is the summary of the research project:

Internet Research and Ethics 2.0:
The Internet Research Ethics Digital Library, Interactive Resource Center, and Online …

I’m a big fan of the New York Times Magazine’s weekly column, The Ethicist. I’m not a big fan, however, of the column’s namesake, Randy Cohen. He is often much too consequentialist for my liking, too simplistic is his ethical analyses, and his attempts to include humor in his responses typically fail (and are an unnecessary distraction from often very interesting ethical dilemmas).
That said, Cohen got it right this week. In an entry titled “A Facebook Teaching Moment”, the scenarior is about a teacher who has been “friended” by a …

I’ve returned from the 8th International Conference of Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiry in Corfu, Greece, where I presented an early draft of a paper based on my critique of the “Taste, Ties, and Time” Facebook data release. The paper was well-received, but I have work ahead of me to improve the manuscript prior to publication.
Overall, the conference was a success. Corfu was delightful, and the presentations sparked good conversations. Following are some highlights and reactions:

Next week I will be attending the 8th International Conference of Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiry in Corfu, Greece, where I will be presenting an early draft of a paper based on my critique of the “Taste, Ties, and Time” Facebook data release.
Recall that last fall, a group of researchers affiliated with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University released a dataset of Facebook profile information from an entire cohort (the class of 2009) of college students from “an anonymous, northeastern American university.” While the researchers took good …