Computers and Society
Social Issues Pages

Community

• Community service is required by both the ACM Code of Ethics and the College of Computer Science curriculum. A complete list of all the individuals and organizations who have been helped would be a project in itself. Some recent examples are service to the College of Computer Science by the Crew and the InfoCity Community Group, service to other units of Northeastern (such as the Chemistry Department's web page), and work with civic organizations such as Massachusetts NetDay and Project Vote Smart. Many students satisfy their service requirement by helping classmates, faculty, or social groups to which they belong.

• How to build a Community Playground by Matt Chojnowski.

• Eric Downing's essay on virtual identity

• Virtually Inevitable by Rebecca Spainhower, a paper on democracy at LambdaMOO

• Information about the community of people who play Internet Chess by Peter Pashkov, Mikhail Derazhne, Yuriy Levinson, and Anatoliy Rivkin

• Virtually Wired, a community access internet provider directed by Coralee Whitcomb

Computer-Mediated Communication

• Mopjax is a small group that produced a multimedia, multilingual, accessible " Hello World " web page to present the results of their class project on privacy and intellectual property. (The pink sheep was an object on InfoCity that apparently contributed to building social solidarity:)

• QED is a group that used their class project machine webspace to create more user friendly documentation to help future students learn to use InfoCity. Their group's assignment had been to compare social and technical controls on behavior by building virtual library books.

• Terri Hawker, Max Tomek, and Mala Herman have taken three different approaches to the issue of online privacy.

• Describing the Pressures and Responsibilities of a Student in a Systems Group by Hank Hughes discusses how the social role of student and systems administrator sometimes conflict and lead to misunderstandings.

• Some solutions to the problems of multicultural communication have been addressed by Jack Wong and Kungbae Park.

Equity and Access

• Bryan May is adding accessible java classes to the web gate to InfoCity.

• Some solutions to the problems of multicultural communication have been addressed by Derek Holden, Chi Kin Wong and Kungbae Park.

Ethics

The ACM Code of Ethics was a group project . CCS students participated in writing the code by providing input during the drafting process.

Health and Safety

Northeastern's Office of Environmental Health and Safety provides links to information on office ergonomics.

A list of other Ergonomics servers can be found at UCSF/UCB Ergonomics Program

Postmodern Culture

• The Virtual World by Sarah Heile, a discussion of virtual classrooms and libraries with extensive links

• Future Imperfect, Charlie Wong, editor-in-Chief

• The Electric Chair by Virginia Ogozalek (not for the low in bandwidth or tolerance)

Privacy, Intellectual Property and Social Control

Many people have worked on the interrelated topics of privacy, intellectual property, and social control. An updated version of the page originally designed by Fabio Rojas and revised by Michael Boucher has been most recently revised by Andrew Slater. Some other contributions:
• Rating the Web by Eric Kilby

• Critical Privacy and Security Issues on the Net by Entropy (James Pappas, Jackson Fong, Paul Lee, Tara Edwards, Michael Lamoly and Stephanie Li)

• Common Misconceptions about Computer Privacy by Geoff Hulten

• Free Speech and Intellectual Property in Zimbabwe by Shamiso Nyamupingidza

• Intellectual Property, Privacy And Censorship by Amit Gulaya

Work

• Electronic Mail Privacy in the Workplace by Han Li.

• Women in Computing by Sheila Mehta

• Privacy in the Workplace, by Three Guys and a Girl (Paul Guglielmino, Patrick Tibbetts, Karen Lanzilotta, and Michael Ruelle)

Other Issues

Government, The Human Genome Project, Standards, Computer Impacts on Economic Organizations, Environmental Modeling, International Relations, The Military, The Web Museum, Computers in Medicine, Internet II, etc.