From: Molly de Blanc Deb Nicholson is a free software policy expert and a passionate community advocate. She is the Community Outreach Director for the Open Invention Network, the world's largest patent non-aggression community, which serves GNU, the kernel Linux, Android, and other key free software projects. Deb Nicholson is a free software policy expert and a passionate community advocate. She is the Community Outreach Director for the Open Invention Network, the world's largest patent non-aggression community, which serves a number of key free software projects. She won the OâReilly Open Source Award for her work with GNU MediaGoblin and OpenHatch. She is a founding organizer of the Seattle GNU/Linux Conference, an annual event dedicated to surfacing new voices and welcoming new people to the free software community. She also serves on the Software Freedom Conservancy's Evaluation Committee, which acts as a curator for new member projects. She lives with her husband and her lucky black cat in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Photo of Deb Nicholson by Misty Smith CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0Deb Nicholson
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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 where ethical stumbles can 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. At last year's conference, 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.
+Many communities have widely adopted codes of ethics governing the moral conduct of their members and professionals. Some of these codes may even be enshrined in law, and for good reasonâcertain conduct can have enormous consequences on the lives of others.
+Software and technology pervade 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 the moral obligations of other fields, and to consider how leaders and educators should approach ethics within education and guidance.