AUTHOR
Richard Lucas and John Weckert

ABSTRACT

Introduction

As a result of a survey and in-depth interviews conducted by the authors (and others) in 2007 they have developed a list of a number of areas within the broad field of ethics, regulations, and ICT 1 within the Australian ICT Industry that are in need of further research. While there are a great many important and interesting results that are deserving of further examination there does seem to be some that are deserving of more immediate action and others which are of a longer term nature.

First and foremost is the research area surrounding what needs to be done now to begin to get better ethical thinking and behaviour. The second research area centres around what needs to be done in the longer term to ensure continued and increased ethical performance. Finally research needs to be conducted into how the management of the ethical integrity systems generally can be improved upon. Schematically the recommendations are as follows:

• Immediate
  • Education
  • Low Profile of the Code of Ethics
  • Professionalism
• Long Term
  • Implementing EMS’s
  • New EMS Software
• Ongoing
  • the state of the industry,
  • ethical regulations,
  • technical and ethical tertiary education, and
  • the differing generations that make up the ICT workforce.

In this abstract only the areas of immedia our deliberations on the other two areas.

Areas of Immediate Concern

Education

The survey suggested that ethics education has no affect on ethical attitudes or on ethical behaviour. While further research would be required to understand why this is so, the survey and the interviews together with the examination of the content of courses that was conducted on the Internet, suggest that there may be a mismatch between what is taught and what the main issues really are for working professionals. This was discussed in the previous chapter.

We recommend that attention is given to three issues:

• The Content of Ethics Components
• The Structure of Ethics Components
• Teachers of Ethics Components

Low Profile of the Code of Ethics

There is not a high awareness of the ACS codes. And many do not see codes of ethics as relevant. The survey showed that awareness of codes in general is higher where those codes are part of the workplace and this is also stated in the literature. Regarding awareness of the ACS codes, we recommend that these codes be part of all ethics components in ACS accredited ICT courses and that the ACS targets workplaces to raise the awareness of the codes in those workplaces. Regarding relevancy, we recommend that there are procedures in place so that the codes are regularly reassessed, and that consideration be given to tailoring the codes to different sub-groups of ITC professionals. Additionally we recommend that attention be paid to ensuring that such codes are a component in a whole of work-life ethical framework.

Professionalism

Research has shown that there is a lack of interest by workers in the ICT industry in being seen as professionals or in ICT being seen as a profession. This might be the result of many different factors. It might be because the industry is so diverse, as can be seen from the large number of self-descriptions of occupations given in the survey, or because a large number of those in the industry do not have ICT qualifications. This two reasons might be partially overcome by the implementation of the previous recommendations but in addition we recommend that more emphasis is placed on publishing pieces on ethics in places that are widely read by those in the ICT industry (eg, the Australian, Age and SMH, Computerworld); that ACS target management of organisations, particular large ones, to raise the profile of the industry as a profession; as a high priority address the issue of why there is so little interest in being considered a professional.

In most professions, and in many trades, people must pass some accreditation procedure before they can practice. This is true not only for doctors and lawyers but also for plumbers and electricians. But it is not true for ICT professionals. Common objections given by others to some form of licensing or accreditation by professional bodies are not compelling and further research is needed in this area. We recognize that there are current efforts in this direction in pursuing this issue and recommend that these efforts continue and indeed be expanded.

Areas of Long Term Interest

While the areas of immediate interest are important and need to be addressed now there are further areas that also need attention to ensure the long term and continuous improvement in the ethical thinking, decision-making, and behaviour of ICT professionals. However these areas will take considerably longer to put into effect.

These are:

• implementing ethics management systems,
• Constructing EMS software, and
• tailoring codes.

Ongoing Research

While there are some things that can be started straightaway, there are others which require further research before it can be decided what is to be done next in the program of increasing ethical thinking, decision making, and behaviour in ICT.

The areas identified for ongoing research are:

• the state of the industry,
• ethical regulations,
• technical and ethical tertiary education,
• the differing generations that make up the ICT workforce, and
  international comparisons.

AUTHOR
Mike Leigh and Mary Prior

ABSTRACT

In recent years there has been a huge expansion in the use of Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) in academic institutions. ‘E-learning’ and ‘blended learning’ seek to enhance the learning experience of students in higher education and to help address the different learning styles of students. However, in the enthusiasm of higher education institutions and their staff to implement e-learning technologies, has their ethical dimension been overlooked? In particular, this paper examines whether there are monitoring and surveillance issues that should be considered, and proposes some good practice guidelines to help fill the policy vacuum in this area.

The growth in the use of VLEs has been accompanied by an increasing number of publications and conferences that address technological and pedagogic issues. However, less attention has been given to the ethical dimension of the use of technology in education. Jefferies et al [2007] explore the relationships between technology, pedagogy and ethics, raising a number of issues, including privacy and data protection, and the power relationship between tutor and student. An early survey of the student perspective also raised the issue of privacy, alongside surveillance and the cost to the student of the use of technology [Stahl, 2002].

There is a considerable literature on electronic monitoring in the workplace, and the issues to which this can give rise. These range from concerns about employees’ privacy and autonomy [Brey 1999, Moore 2000, Hartman 2001] to effects on health [Smith et al. 1992, Aiello, 1993, Aiello & Kolb, 1995]. Other research found employees to be relatively unconcerned about the privacy aspects of ‘surveillance-capable technologies’ in the workplace [Mason et al. 2002]. Furthermore, employees and their managers are also capable of collaborating to meet the organisation’s goals, whether this means using the monitoring/surveillance systems or finding ways to apparently ‘subvert’ them [ibid.].

This paper, firstly, reviews the e-learning literature to support the contention that to date only limited attention has been paid to the ethical issues arising from the use of VLEs. Secondly, it provides an overview of the ethical issues raised by electronic surveillance in the workplace, and discusses their relevance to the world of virtual learning. Thus, a comparison between the use of a VLE within a higher education institution, and electronic workplace monitoring, is provided. Thirdly, the paper reports the outcome of a study undertaken in a UK university. The study involves a survey of student attitudes to the monitoring of their activities via a VLE, using a questionnaire, followed by the use of focus groups to pursue students’ views in more depth. This is supported by a series of structured interviews with members of academic staff to determine their use of the monitoring facilities within the VLE, and their awareness of how this may be used in turn to monitor their own activities.

Some of the ethical issues related to VLE use may be similar to those raised by electronic workplace monitoring. For example, privacy may be a concern to both employees and students, and function creep is a potential threat in both contexts. Expecting students to engage with activities centred on the VLE may restrict learning opportunities and could lead to a narrow, quantitative view of student learning and participation. The same narrow measures may be applied to academic staff, to judge their compliance with institutional e-learning strategies. Indeed, as one incident reported by Jefferies et al [2007] indicates, a VLE offers the opportunity for not only internal managers, but also external quality assessors, to have access to tutor-staff interactions. This presents the prospect of multiple layers of monitoring, where academic staff who can monitor student activities are in turn monitored by institutional managers and external auditors. Undue reliance on one set of quantitative measures of performance can result in judgements being made on a narrow basis, and can have the effect of forcing those monitored to behave in a certain way.

There are in existence ‘good practice’ guidelines for employers concerning the use of electronic monitoring, but there appears to have been little, if any, attention to this aspect of VLEs.

This paper explores these and other issues raised by the empirical work with students and staff. It presents some ‘good practice’ guidelines for the ethical use of VLEs in higher education, particularly with respect to its potential for monitoring and surveillance. It is expected to be of interest to academic staff involved in delivering higher education courses, academic managers and those responsible for the design and deployment of VLEs.

REFERENCES

Aiello, John R. [1993] Computer-based work monitoring: electronic surveillance and its effects. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, vol. 23 [no. 7], 499-507.

Aiello, John R. & Kolb, Kathryn J. [1995] Electronic performance monitoring and social context: impact on productivity and stress. Journal or Applied Psychology, vol. 80 [no. 3], 339-353.

Brey, Philip [1999], Worker autonomy and the drama of digital networks in organizations, Journal of Business Ethics, vol. 22 [no. 1], 15-25.

Hartman, Laura P. [2001] Technology and ethics: privacy in the workplace. Business and Society Review, vol. 106 [no. 1], 1-27.

Jefferies, Pat, Carsten-Stahl, Bernd and McRobb, Steve [2007] Exploring the relationships between pedagogy, ethics and technology: building a framework for strategy development. Technology, Pedagogy and Eduction, vol. 16 [no. 1], 111-126.

Mason, David, Button, Graham, Lankshear, Gloria and Coates, Sally. [2002] Getting real about surveillance and privacy at work. In Woolgar, Steve [ed.] Virtual Society? Technology, Cyberbole, Reality. Oxford.

Moore, Adam D. [2000] Employee monitoring and computer technology: evaluative surveillance v. privacy. Business Ethics Quarterly, vol. 10 [no. 3], 697-709.

Smith, M.J., Carayon, P., Sanders, K.J., Lim, S-Y. & LeGrande, D. [1992] Applied Ergonomics, vol. 23 [no. 1], 17-27.

Stahl, Bernd Carsten [2002] Ethics and e-teaching: the students’ perspective. Communications of the IIMA, vol. 2 [no. 3], 51-62.

AUTHOR
Gaetano Aurelio Lanzarone and Federico Gobbo

ABSTRACT

Attempting to formalize ethical knowledge and reasoning serves two purposes: understanding human ethics and designing computer ethics. While the former is descriptive, subject to the intricacies of human behaviors and scarcely prone to systematic experimentation, the latter is prescriptive, can be experimented with little limitations and has to do with ‘ideal’ ethical behavior, which restricts the class of models we are interested in. The need to instill ethical guidance into artificial agents, besides its speculative interest, is related to the practical problems arising from the building of (semi-)autonomous intelligent robots, to be deployed not only in special environments inaccessible to humans but also living within the human environment. Logical and computational formalization of ethics could be useful for both artificial agents and human agents designing them.

Roughly, two main approaches are possible. In the ‘axiomatic’ approach, a set of rules is established, from which an agent derives ethical behaviour. In the ‘situated’ approach, the agent is immersed within an environment from which it informally absorbs good behaviour. Both approaches have advantages and pitfalls. In the former, the human desiderata can be expressed but their context-dependent application is far from guaranteed; the dangers of hard coding behavioral rules are well known. In the latter approach, creating ethical robots that learn from scratch is difficult, since such learning does not scale up from simple to more complex capabilities; ethical rules cannot be dispensed with entirely, otherwise un-principled behaviours might emerge. However, it is commonly understood that the two approaches can usefully coexist, and it may be useful to adopt a mixed approach.

Several authors (e.g. Roger Clarke) have discussed, in guise of a thought experiment, Asimov’s Laws of Robotics as first attempts at programming robot ethics and how Asimov’s robot stories explore the implications of these laws, reaching the conclusion that serious doubts arise about the possibility of devising a set of rules providing reliable control over machines. Two main problems have been evidenced. The first is related to ambiguities in the language used, so that the robot does what it was told, but not what was intended. For example, an ambiguity is the definition of injury in the first law, the robot having to take into account psychological injury as well as physical. The second problem has to do with conflicts among the laws and within a single law; the prioritization of the ethical rules may lead to exceptions being invoked because one value is deemed more important than another. Thus, while a rule has to be followed prima facie, exceptions are rules to resolve collisions between values in practical circumstances. For example, telling the truth is right and deception is wrong, except when lying is acceptable behaviour, e.g. lying to avoid causing another person damage. Exceptions to exceptions can also arise; for example, hurting other people is wrong, except when acting in self-defense, but only unless the self-defensive reaction is not disproportioned.

Artificial Intelligence has developed a rich set of methods of knowledge representation and reasoning, which can be adopted in ethics. The paper will examine some of them and discuss their application to mitigate the problems encountered in the axiomatic approach. The method we discuss is combining ethical rules with empirical knowledge acquired by concrete experience. Obeying ethical rules being similar to abiding by laws, we consider an approach developed for the interpretation of open-textured terms in legal rules, based on precedent cases, and an extension of this approach based on analogical reasoning, abstraction hierarchies and reasoning by default with exceptions (see references below).

Explanation-Based Learning (EBL) is a machine-learning technique which creates generalizations of given examples on the basis of background domain knowledge. We consider EBL’s domain knowledge as corresponding to ethical rules, and EBL’s training examples as corresponding to precedent cases. By making the interpretation of vague terms as guided by precedents, we use EBL as an effective process capable of creating a link between terms appearing as open-textured concepts in ethical rules, and terms appearing as ordinary language wording for stating the facts of a previous experience. As extensions to standard EBL, we consider precedent cases supplemented by additional heuristics, represented by abstraction hierarchies with constraints and exceptions.

The axiomatic and the situated approaches are thus reconciled. On the one hand, without empirical experience, rule-based ethical systems cannot determine whether open-textured terms in rule antecedents match the current situation to be decided and acted upon. On the other hand, without the guidance of general rules, precedent cases are only fragmented knowledge, unsuitable to being carried on to new situations; analogical reasoning and abstraction principles are needed to fill in the knowledge gaps, for example, by noting similarities and considering more general classes encompassing the concepts of both rules and cases.

A provisional conclusion of the paper is that, while computer ethics does not seem amenable to finite axiomatizability and therefore is un-computable in general, at least part of it could be computed by supplementing ethical rules with empirical experience. Studying how far the frontier of the computable part of computer ethics can be pushed, the nature of the un-computable ‘residue’ (as Alan Turing called it) might appear more clearly.

The paper will give illustrations and examples of the aforementioned techniques, together with relevant citations of other authors’ work.

REFERENCES

Costantini S., Lanzarone G.A., Explanation-Based Interpretation of Open-Textured Concepts in Logical Models of Legislation, Artificial Intelligence and Law, vol.3, n.3, Kluwer Acedemic Publisher, 1995, 191-208.

Costantini S., Lanzarone G.A., Metalevel Representation of Analogical Inference, in: Ardizzone E., Gaglio S., Sorbello F. (editors), Trends in Artificial Intelligence, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence n. 549, Springer-Verlag, 1991, 460-464.

Costantini S., Lanzarone G.A., Sbarbaro L., A Formal Definition and a Sound Implementation of Analogical Reasoning in Logic Programming, Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, 14, 1995, 17-36.

AUTHOR
Paul B. de Laat

ABSTRACT

The phenomenon of open source software (OSS) is a technical miracle on the one hand: thousands of volunteers work together on a globally distributed basis. In order to keep chaos at bay, quite a range of formal governance tools have been developed. On the other hand, OSS is a socio-political miracle: hackers cooperate for a public cause, without receiving any payment. Source code effectively becomes a public good, free for everyone to use, modify, and (re)distribute. A commons is created with, as a rule, some regulations attached.

This model of `peer production of source code’ can be applied in many other contexts. However, these extensions often create private value only. Some extensions compare more closely with OSS by employing open source (OS) tools for the creation of public value. I focus on the latter here, for two reasons. In this age of privatization the publicly accessible commons is under siege. This is to be regretted while a vibrant commons is vital for creativity. Furthermore, the OSS movement serves to mobilize and further altruistic motivations. Careful attendance to practices that nurture such civic virtue is a societal interest. My main question therefore becomes: In what ways the model of open source (OS) can be extended beyond software while keeping its public spirit intact? The answer is twofold: (1) OS can be applied to products other than software, and (2) OS can be embedded in existing institutions.

1

Extension of the (publicly spirited) model of OSS to other informational products is already underway. While Open Access and Wikipedia are well known examples, my focus is on some newer ones. Peer-to-peer sharing is successful in Flickr, where pictures are posted and usually tagged as well. These are made available for everybody, with a creative commons license attached. Furthermore, on Del.icio.us volunteers publish (and tag) links they deem to be interesting. Peer-to-peer production is entering the new domain of film, which, I argue, gives OS a new twist. `Swarm of Angels’ is a typical OS movie project. Volunteers participate in script writing (using wiki software) and vote about the choice of script, deadlines and publicity material. The finished product is to be released with a creative commons license that allows non-commercial remixing. Notice though, that participants have to pay an entry fee (of 25 Euro) while the production crew has to be paid a normal salary.

On the other hand, if we turn our attention to physical products, peer production à la OSS seems farther away. For one thing, any type of product requires people investing hours of their precious time. Physical ones, however, also require monetary investments for equipment, materials and the like. For another, as a more subtle nuance, `material’ R&D usually involves tacit knowledge. While OSS can thrive on explicit knowledge alone as evidenced in source code releases, normally R&D has to cope with this implicitness. That is why participants in international R&D alliances, no matter which virtual tools are applied, usually meet face-to-face from time to time. In all, I argue that peer production of physical products tends to have a more local centre of gravity and less emphasis on formal governance tools or IPRs. These assertions are underpinned by looking at `user innovation’ of sports equipment, as analyzed by von Hippel et alii.

2

OS can also become part of the `business model’ of existing companies. Let me treat the case of software first. Leaving aside the approach of `free-riding’ upon OS products, companies may, first, try to tap developers’ talent. OS marketplaces are created, on which software assignments are posted for (paid) execution by volunteers. Secondly, a platform for the production of source code may be mounted on the Internet, accessible to all (`corporate OS network’). Thirdly, in view of enriching the value of a particular hardware or software platform, outside developers may be invited to develop applications (`developer OS network’).

Can these developments contribute to furthering a vibrant commons? OS marketplaces obviously do not. OS networks may contribute, I argue, but most of the time these have close ties to corporate interests, which prevents contributing to the public cause. Licensing may be asymmetrical (more rights granted to the company than to the public at large), access – and licensing accordingly – may be restricted, and so on. Only rarely companies conclude that their best interests are served by turning a network of theirs into an independent venture. Then, of course, the public cause is served.

Thereupon we turn our attention to products other than software. This is the area of `wikinomics’, of `crowdsourcing’, of `open innovation’. Evidence indicates that the same institutional developments of OS marketplaces, corporate networks and developer networks are unfolding. I argue that – also here – mostly corporate interests are being served. Notice that these developments only apply to informational products, while for physical products hardly any proper `peer production’ is conceivable (cf. above).

Some concrete examples are analyzed in support of this proposition. InnoCentive is a virtual marketplace (`ideagora’), on which companies post their unresolved R&D problems in search for `solvers’ who get paid for their solutions. Obviously, there is no relation with the public cause. Burda Mode invites seamstresses from all over the world to put their patterns on burdastyle.com. Lego, similarly, has a scheme called Lego Factory, allowing users to upload their designs for general use. With Lego Mindstorms hobbyists can download enabling source code (with a GPL), and upload robotic software that they produce with it in return. In all these networks the licensing scheme is asymmetrical, reserving rights of modification and of commerce exclusively to the companies themselves. Notice that for the Lego designs to have any use at all, hobbyists need to buy the corresponding Lego hardware first.

AUTHOR
Mikael Laaksoharju and Iordanis Kavathatzopoulos

ABSTRACT

Organizations often have policies and guidelines concerning decisions where moral judgment is required. But what happens when these rules of thumb are not directly applicable on the moral problem in question? The result is often that the individual dealing with the issue is left to her or his own judgments – judgments that might be limited by reluctance to act against norms as well as against the individual’s own personal moral. More commonly, the individual might not even be aware of there being ethical issues in a case. In this paper it is discussed how the ability to recognize and deal with ethical issues can be improved.

In most of present test and training systems for ethical competence, dilemmas are extreme and the ethical implications in the available options are stronger and pushier than in real life, a constraint that tends to lead to unrealistic choice situations. This makes the translation of the learning back to real life situations not very apparent and thus motivates a more fluid simulation environment, where decisions lead to new problems based on the new conditions. From this we also conclude that it is important to create scenarios that are realistic and highly relevant to the test subject, as well as to stress the control that the test subject does exercise in a situation. The ethicality of each decision is not of particular interest, but rather the manner in which the problems are approached and how the confrontation with the consequences is handled.

When judging an individual’s ethical competence it is tempting to compare and relate it to an ideal behavior; a code of conduct or a philosophy of morality. We want to avoid this by letting the subject deal with the consequences of decisions. The actual judgment of morality is left to the individual facing the dilemma. We are simply interested in studying the process of decision making, where ethical competence can be regarded as the ability to process available information in an optimal way. This motivates a focus on autonomy. We believe that to be the necessary foundation to achieve complete ethical competence: Not as the ability to always act according to guidelines; not as the ability to act in a manner that is consistent with the most number of philosophies; but as the ability to use the right ethical problem-solving and decision-making method in handling moral problems.

Our work revolves around a micro world simulator, in which the researcher is allowed to define virtual stakeholders and to them assign interests and urges as well as principles to obey. The test subject then has to consider these stakeholders and in order to affect their behavior he/she is encouraged to legislate when identifying sites of conflict, in order to maintain a desired harmony in the simulation. If the rules created are not satisfactory for the stakeholders, they will protest against them.

To determine symptoms of autonomy, a clear distinction needs to be made from heteronomy. This can be done either by discern symptoms of autonomy directly or to do the exact opposite. Some patterns of heteronomy might be easier to pinpoint and classify due to their nature of regularity. The main question treated in this paper is thus: How can we distinguish symptoms of autonomy in the context of a dynamic micro world simulation?

To make the notion of micro worlds useful, it is necessary to define a theoretical framework. We base this on the discourse of morality as rules, leaning mainly on the work of Piaget and Kohlberg but also of Foucault, with more recent counterparts and analogies in earlier work of Kavathatzopoulos et al.

At the moment, the most critical task is to validate micro worlds as a method to measure and train ethical competence. Two things in particular are interesting to study: 1) We want to determine which parameters to measure, that indicate autonomous decision making, and 2) we want to establish a model for interpreting the proceedings and the subject’s interaction with the simulation as a representation of the character of decision making. The request on the simulator is to give information about the process behind how decisions are made, in this case: how rules are created. From that the symptoms that differ between heteronomy and autonomy, can be derived. In the paper we problemize one implementation of this psychological approach towards ethical decision making, to suggest how the tool can be used for stimulating ethical competence.

Symptoms of autonomy to be distinguished in the micro world:

• The ability to reason about decisions and pass arguments for the choices made (encouraged by rule creation and objecting stakeholders).
• A fearless attitude towards norms (stimulated by the rule creation).
• A systematic, self critical and holistic approach towards problem solving (measurable from the amount and focus of user interaction).
• A confidence and assurance that allows the test subject to act according to an independently reached conviction about what is the right thing to do (tested by objecting stakeholders).

Also the parameters that can help us describe autonomy in the micro world:

• Can the time it takes for a subject to reach a decision serve as a representation for thoughtfulness and systematization?
• Can the number of questions asked and the eagerness to ask questions serve as an indication of ambitions to reach an exhaustive knowledge about the situation?
• Can the focus for questions give clues about 1) whether the subject is considering risks and opportunities, or about 2) the subjects ambition to reach a better understanding of the stakeholders and the situation?
• Can the coherence between the questions indicate how systematically the subject is approaching the situation?
• Can the structure of decisions, in connection with preceding investigations, give information about the holism in the subject’s conception of the situation?

AUTHOR
Sunil Kumar, Manju Dhariwal, Arun K Pujari and Raghubir Sharan

ABSTRACT

Within a very short period of time, ICTs have become increasingly ubiquitous in the world. In fact, these are getting interwoven in our lives. In this process, ICTs have created a good deal of expectation that these can be employed to enhance the welfare of all mankind. The important word here is all -all mankind. A technology necessarily may not help all mankind; it may privilege one section of mankind and deprive the other. Our aim should be to overcome this limitation and shape and design ICT in such a way that the number of privileged is increased and the number of deprived is decreased. It is worth mentioning here that this is not the prevailing way of looking at technology.

Before proceeding further, let us clarify what we mean by privileged and deprived people. We do it by noting some of the synonyms (attributes) of privileged that come to mind. These are, haves, masters, colonizers, oppressors. Similarly, the synonyms of deprived can be taken as have-nots, slaves, colonized, oppressed. With this in mind, let us denote privileged as class A and deprived as class B. One immediately observes that class A and class B appear at several levels- between nations, between communities of the same nation, between genders, and finally in the two sides inside the same human being. In other words, one is overwhelmed by inter-class and intra-class divides.

Technologies are generally built on existing technologies to add affluence to existing affluence. ICTs must strive for narrowing the gap in any society. Many feel that ICTs have grown beyond their initial assumptions and all facets of ICTs do not contribute towards narrowing the gap even for the society that developed ICTs. Some components of ICTs do intentionally cause widening the gap between class A and class B. In this competition, a section of mankind is left behind and gets deprived. It is treated as collateral damage.

This was a major objection of Mahatma Gandhi to large scale deployment of technology. It is generally believed that unlike technology, democracy, if properly used, has potential to reduce this gap. It appears then that use of ICT to strengthen democratic processes may turn out to be beneficial. This should be of special interest to developing countries like India which are experimenting with democracy under adverse circumstances.

Our limited concern in this paper is to look afresh on ICT so that it is of help in reducing the number of deprived (class B) in the desert province of Rajasthan, which is located in the western part of India. Rajasthan has a population of approximately 57 million which is almost equal to the population of Italy. The per capita income in this province is approximately US $ 400. The state of economic affluence as well as the state of technology in Rajasthan is indeed very different from those of America and Western Europe (where ICT was originally developed). Assumptions which are taken for granted in latter societies may not hold at all in the former society. Under the circumstances, a thoughtless hype on potentiality of ICT to enhance the welfare of all mankind may cause serious despair. This calls for a different way of looking at ICT.

This can be done in three different ways: i) by using existing ICT tools, ii) by making minor extensions and modifications to existing tools and iii) by thinking of totally new ways in which technology and social concern will cooperate to enhance the welfare of all mankind. This last one is, obviously, the most difficult one and there are no ready answers. We are struggling to develop an attack on this problem. For the present, some successful examples of deployment of technology in India, which have proven to be beneficial to deprived, are presented here.

1. Institutional structure which enables each eligible voter to cast his/her vote is essential for democracy to survive. This structure is stretched to its limit in vast countries with large population like India. The sheer volume of printing of ballot papers, their transportation, counting and so on, becomes marathon operation. This provides scope for corruption (which hurts the deprived more then it hurts the privileged). To obviate this, in the last decade, electronic voting machines (EVM) have been deployed in India. Initially this task appeared unsolvable. But the election commission of India persevered with the help of two public sector units and successfully overcame enormous difficulties. Use of EVMs has provided more efficient governance of election process; thereby it has empowered the have-nots to cast their votes and get their candidates elected.
2. The technology of EVM needs several refinements. At the present, these operate as isolated units. It should be possible to use networking to qualitatively improve data transfer from EVM to a central nodal point. For it to be possible ICT has to become qualitatively more secure and reliable; also very different Human-Computer Interfaces have to be developed. This has to be done with realistically assessed conditions of technology and affluence of developing countries. A requirement sheet, along with the ensuing specification sheet has been prepared by our research group. Implementation of this design is under consideration. Progress in this regard will be reported in the conference.