The Town Hall Meeting was designed to encourage and collect anecdotes, stories, and examples of information ethics in practice (or not in practice) at your library or organization.
The event started off with an explanation of the SLA 2008 Ethics initiative by our chapter's Ethics Ambassador, Kaia Densch.
This introduction was followed a presentation entitled, "Information Ethics and the Social Web" by Cody Hanson. Cody highlighted the ethical concerns of social technologies--encouraging discussion of the tensions between Privacy, Intellectual Property, and Information as a Resource.
Cody challenged the crowd to wonder:
- Is it Worth Trading your Privacy for the Services you Desire?
- Does Good Customer Service Require We Break All the Rules about Guarding Privacy?
Cody's presentation stimulated many questions & insights from the crowd.
The Q&A triggered so much discussion they preempted the other planned events.
Kaia suggested we continue the conversation. An e-survey will be sent to the membership and the MN SLA Information Ethics Blog was launched. You are invited to be involved in the on-going gathering of data from our Chapter on the key information ethics issues to help craft official ethics guidelines for the Association.