Ethics

For this project, I plan on becoming a Mad Scientist, so that I can adopt a veneer of insanity to justify my callous disregard for humanity.

Hahaha... Just kidding.

More seriously, I think that there were some interesting things in that reading that I plan on keeping in mind. Not all of it is entirely relevant to this project, but here are the bits that I'm going to be looking out for:

1. Concerns over privacy - As I got to the bit where they talk about the difference between things intended to be public and things intended to be private even though they were published in a public manner, my mind immediately jumped to Boyd discussing networked publics. I think this is probably the biggest concern for us in our project, because, even though we are researching the interactions of people on public forums, the comments and post were still intended for a specific audience at a specific time. However, I think this is mitigated by a couple of factors:
   • The setting of the posts - these posts are on public forums, and in many cases people are directed towards these forums for more information, meaning that there is an assumption of a lack of privacy in the culture of forum usage.
   • The nature of the research - the research is looking into the nature of collaboration, and is therefore unlikely to expose anny of the involved parties to any risk, as the topic itself is not risky.
2. Concerns over data - For our data, we are likely going to gather forum conversations/posts and investigate reference materials created by members, which we will analyze to find patterns of collaboration and community. Most of the data we are unlikely to keep, but we will almost definitely keep examples which demonstrate certain trends or methods. We will ahve to keep inn mind when choosing these examples whether the authors would approve of the publicity they're being given.