A Common Ground for Developing a Global Conscience

This paper illustrates the evolution of how a professional organization learned to recognize and manage its social and ethical responsibility with a specific focus on the roles and contributions of IFIP’s Ethical Frameworks Special Interest Group (SIG 9.2.2). IFIP’s decades-long journey to adopting an international code of computing ethics revealed issues faced by any organization trying to express its moral values in a code of ethics, how to develop them, and how they can be used. Illustrating the development of this code in the rapidly changing ICT profession also uncovers ways to design aspirational codes which can be used in making ethical judgements about how to use technology and which technology to use. Suggestions for how to support a code once it is adopted and code decision-support tools developed in this process are also presented.