AUTHOR

Vanessa Hymas,
Business Development Manager,
Institute for the Management of Information Systems

ABSTRACT

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Introduce:
Self
Organisation
Reason for Research:

Large numbers entering IT courses
Do not go on to pursue careers in IT
Why is this an Issue?

Slide 2 – WHY IS THIS AN ISSUE?
Current projections show job demand in the ICT sector growing at approximately 1 million per year. The projected shortfall of skilled personnel in the sector is 1.7 million by the year 2003. Implications:

• Businesses unable to find skilled labour
• They will relocate to countries where the labour pool is available and affordable.

In the 1960’s women occupied roughly half of the jobs in IT, but these were largely the unskilled data entry positions. Today, although there are more women enrolling in university courses than men, they are not joining ICT programmes.

Despite their apparent reluctance to take up careers in IT, over 40% of on-line users today are women, and that number is expected to grow to 60% in the next two years.

The puzzle is why, in the Western countries, are women who are clearly capable of handling the academic material, choosing not to enter the sector?

Slide 3 – IMIS CONTRIBUTION

Important for everyone involved to contribute to addressing the issue.

IMIS is working closely with government, educationalists, industry and other associations to find ways of reversing this damaging trend.

As part of our contribution, we have commissioned research to identify where in the education process we can capture the imagination, and eventually the commitment, of young women to a career in IS/IT.

We sought to identify the career aspirations of women who have chosen to study IS in university.

We wanted to identify, in particular, where those reasons might differ from their male colleagues.

We surveyed students currently enrolled in the first and final year programmes at 9 universities around the U.K.

Students were asked by their tutors to complete a simple questionnaire in class. The surveys were then returned for analysis to our research consultant. A considerable amount of the data collected was qualitative, i.e. written questions rather than tick boxes, because we need, at this stage, to identify the issues in the students’ own words.

Slide 4 – GENDER REPRESENTATION

What the sample looked like:

Intake statistics from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (in the UK) show that the number of women entering Computer Studies courses as a percentage of total intake has been steadily increasing, from 21.8% in 1995, to 25.5% in 1999.

Our sample, covering a combined business and information systems programme could expect to have a slightly higher percentage of women as it is seen as less technical.

Slide 5 – COURSE CHOICE REASONS

15% of the first year sample claimed that this was not their first choice course. There was only a 1 percent difference between male and female students on this issue, and the courses they indicated they would have preferred were within the same disciplines of business and/or IT.

Of the vast majority who indicated that IS was their first choice these are just some of the comments we received in response to the question ‘Why’

[Point to slide]

It is interesting to note that the first two comments were made by male students, and the second two by female students.

Slide 6 – COURSE EXPERIENCE

31% of the students surveyed claim to have found the course more difficult than expected, which may indicate that their expectations were unrealistic but there was no significant gender variation on this result. The men were just as likely to have found the course difficult as the women.

Slide 7 – CHANGES IN CAREER AMBITIONS

Somewhere between First and Final year, a further 15% of students decide they do not want to remain working in Information Systems throughout their careers.

Again, there is no significant gender split – 69% of women intend to remain in IS, compared to 66% of the men in Final Year.

Of those who want to move out of IS, many will chose to focus either on business or technology, rather than pursuing the combined disciplines.

However a significant percentage (over 25%) don’t know what else they want to do, indicating a movement away from IS rather than towards something else.

There were some clues given in the comments to open questions:

• Some First Year students complained of a lack of motivation and commitment to the subject matter.
• Several of the Final year students were put off by the design of the academic programme itself.

Slide 8 – CAREER ASPIRATIONS

By the Final Year, as you would expect, many of the ‘undecideds’ from the First Year have made a career choice.

The percentage choosing to become Systems Analysts has not changed, but many more students appear to be moving towards:

• IT Support and Networking
• Graphics and Web Design
• Project Management
• Consultancy.

This may be as a result of growth in career opportunities or the idea that there is a lot of money to be made in these types of jobs.

Slide 9 – GENDER PREFERENCES

This chart shows the Final Year students’ career aspirations, by gender. Now we see some definite differences in the directions male and female students favour, with the men pursuing the more technical roles in internet/e-commerce, graphics and web design and IT support and networks.

Women, on the other hand, seem more likely to move into the types of roles that emphasise business and communication skills, such as systems analysis, project management and consultancy.

Slide 10 – PERCEIVED OBSTACLES We thought it would be interesting to identify what the students thought might prevent them from achieving their objectives.

Many of the students expressed a high degree of confidence, which was coded in the Non-Response category.

Of those who did express a concern, the most frequently mentioned, almost twice as often by male students as female, was the fear of failing the course.

Another concern was related to the structure of the IS course itself or to the perception that these courses are not yet accepted by industry.

Women were more likely than men to be concerned about the lack of experience and its affect on their career prospects, and they mentioned discrimination more frequently.

Interestingly, their discrimination concerns were as likely to be over age or race as they were about gender discrimination. Both Males and Females expressed concern about needing to meet the demands of family commitments around their careers.

Slide 11 – WHAT CAN WE DO?

The research has raised a number of issues and pointed the way to some action we can take.

We need to reach people at an earlier age – some studies have suggested as early as 9 to 12 years of age – if we want them to consider a career in IT.

Courses need to be more relevant with course developments being industry led.

Mentors and role models need to be available to develop and encourage young girls and women into the sector.

We need to understand that we are missing out on a tremendous source of talented workers who have so much to contribute to the development of the IT sector and our economies.

It is through cooperative initiatives, involving schools, industry, government and professional bodies that we will make the most impact.

Slide 12 – …… AND FINALLY

If you would like a copy of the research or wish to participate in any future activities please contact us by email or search our Internet site.

AUTHOR

Dr David Sanford Horner
University of Brighton,
UK.

ABSTRACT

Negroponte (1996) writes of an ‘ontological shift’ from being analogue to being digital. The meaning of such a claim has been elaborated with the popularisation of the ideas of ‘virtuality’ , ‘virtual worlds’, and ‘cyberspace’. Cyberspace has been defined as ‘an independent realm created by the interconnection of the world’s information systems’ (Woolley 1992, p.127). Being digital is being in cyberspace. What begins as a fictional narrative in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1995) becomes the discourse of a future – if not of the present.

This paper investigates the computer-ethical issues that are posed by certain conceptions of virtuality and cyberspace. The strong claim of the ‘argument from virtuality’ is that we are confronted with the need to re-invent our moral frameworks. Information and communication technologies permit ‘virtual’ action , i.e. actions which are no longer characterised by the co-ordinates of physical time and space. Does the virtual or intangible nature of such actions change or affect their moral status? Is to suffer in cyberspace morally equivalent to suffering in physical space? Do we need a new moral language to cope with the implications of this new space?

Virtual communities and institutions, it is argued, are already with us constituting a physically disembodied social order. This virtual order exists in parallel with social structures in real space – but will, according to Langdon Winner (1990), eventually compete with a society of entities which occupy spatial locations. Traditional operative moral ideas, it is claimed, are bound up with corporeal identities and their specific spatial, geographical locales and forms of life. The fabric of human relationships and communities rests on real presences, real physical meetings and relationships. Virtual reality converts our primary bodily, corporeal experience into electronically mediated telepresence. Through electronic mediation we can keep the ‘other’ at a distance; play at assuming different identities. The growth of on-line culture may well diminish a sense of ‘real’ community, a sense of solidarity and attachment or indeed force the construction of different kinds of community ties (Heim 1993).

What’s the problem here for moral theory? Floridi (1998) argues, for example, that the victimless crime of the hacker and the ‘ludic’ or game like nature of virtuality challenges the premises of de-ontological ethical theories. Human action in cyberspace may not appear to have the same status as action in real space. Responsibility ceases to be relevant and tangible.

The very nature of virtual action seems to separate the idea of cause and effect. If the consequences of such actions have the properties of being immaterial, undetectable and untraceable does it then make sense to continue to apply consequentialist frameworks? As the consequences of action reach vanishing point so to does the idea of moral sanction. In networks, as Johnson (1997) points out, agents can communicate whilst masking their identity (using pseudonyms and adopting different personas) which disconnects actions from persons. In addition individuals may use others’ words, alter them, or adopt someone else’s identity. (But how is this different from everyday forms of lying?) The effects of distancing and anonymity combine to promote a kind of depersonalisation. The web of action and reaction, the fluidities of identity may again attenuate a sense of responsibility.

Do the conventional notions of a social contract survive in a virtual world? The discourse of rights, justice, authority, equality and even freedom, again according to Winner (1990), presupposes a physical, spatial context. Political morality is tied up with ideas about our being (physically embodied) persons who live in particular locations. How can we talk meaningfully about rights and duties in virtual space? Given the global, nonspatial nature of participation in virtual communities it is easier for individuals to opt out of contractual obligations. Floridi (1998), for example, argues that virtual actions give rise to something akin to a ‘state of nature’ where individuals are very far from having comparable technical competencies or technological facilities and where it is perfectly rational for the ‘strongest’ to opt out of the contract.

The approach in this paper will to question the claim that there is a radical distinction between so called ‘virtual’ actions and ‘physical’ actions. It will challenge the assumption that often underlies moral theory that ‘…doing an action must come down to the making of physical movements with parts of the body’ (Austin 1970, p.178). We need in other words to get behind more specifically what ‘doing an action’ might stand for. Our ideas of persons and of personal accountability are embedded in our language and have evolved from the real situations in which human beings have found themselves and largely continue to find themselves. Any decisions about how to describe and evaluate the status of virtual actions can only be made against this background of current meanings. It is this world which our language, and its everyday stock of concepts, has evolved to deal with – including ideas of praiseworthy and blameworthy actions. Virtuality leaves everything as it is.

REFERENCES

AUSTIN, J.L., 1970, A plea for excuses. In: J.L.Austin, Philosophical Papers, Oxford: Oxford University Press [2nd ed.] pp.175-204. FLORIDI, L., 1999, Information ethics: On the philosophical foundations of information ethics. Ethics and information technology 1 (1), pp.37 – 56

GIBSON, W. 1995, Neuromancer. London: Harper Collins.

HEIM, M. 1993, Metaphysics of virtual reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

JOHNSON, D.G. 1997, Ethics online. Communications of the ACM 40 (1)

NEGROPONTE, N., 1996, Being digital. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

WINNER, L., 1990, Living in electronic space. In: T. Casey and L. Embree, eds., Lifeworld and technology, Lonham MD: Center for Advanced Research on Phenomenology and University Press of America. Pp.1 -14.

WOOLLEY, B. 1993,Virtual worlds. London: Penguin. 15/12/00

AUTHOR
Mike Healy

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the establishment and enforcement of codes of conduct governing the use of Internet technology as a means of providing a basis of trust in the e‑business context. The discussion draws on the findings of a survey of 80 UK organisations, and considers the relationship between factors such as organisation size, type, use of IT, the length time with an Internet connection and the use of a code of conduct, as well as the specific areas of Internet technology covered by codes of conduct. The paper also investigates the extent of disciplinary cases associated with the misuse of Internet technology as well as the ownership and responsibility for implementing codes of conduct. The survey results suggest that the use of codes of conduct varies significantly from organisation to organisation, and that those who initiate such codes are not those primarily seen as being responsible for implementing them. The results also indicate that there is a growing number of employees being disciplined for misuse of facilities offered by Internet technology.

AUTHOR

Agnieszka Gwozdzinska, Jerzy Kaczmarek
Department of Applied Informatics,
Faculty of Electronics,
Telecommunications and Informatics,
Technical University of Gdansk,
ul. Narutowicza 11/12
80-952 Gdansk
POLAND

ABSTRACT

In this article problem of relation between effort of software production and its price will be presented. As effort will be meant time needed to produce it. Price of software will be considered as market value of product, which was set by its producer.

Some methods of effort estimation known in informatics, such as COCOMO, Function Points, COCOTS will be described. An argument, that price should be fairly and objectively related to effort, will be established.

On new, highly changeable software market obviousness of this statement is questioned. Recently there were some unfair practices discovered on those markets. Programmer writes a software product that is one thousand lines long, for example. He estimates it, with COCOMO, Function Points or other methodology, as two manmonth of work. What happens next? Businessman, who wants to make a profit, not a loss, might multiply value of programmer’s work by 200 and might try to sell the product with such a price. In this article it will be considered whether such practice is legal or does it break rules of free market. Impact of such practices on enterprise standing, computing branch outcomes or finally on national gross product will be discussed.

Ethical aspects of such software producer’s attitude will be also taken into consideration. There start some moral dilemma rather from business than from computing ground. Of course, when businessman promises anything untrue about product he sells, it is immoral and even illegal. When he sells overpriced software just to get some Value Added Tax returned from tax department, while really he did nor add anything to product but its price, that’s illegal. But we will not follow such thinking. In the article concentration will be rather on ethical than legal aspects. For example, what happens, when customer does not know, how much particular product may cost and producer takes unfair advantage of him. It will be discussed, whether taking advantage of immaturity of market, when competition mechanisms are not fully formed and there are no points of reference, is ethical.

In this article some market cases, when unfairness of software producers takes place, will be described.

In addition, a trial will be taken to say how it should be and what does it mean “fair price”. It will be proposed, how price of software products should be related to effort.

Some problems with effort estimation such as: how to evaluate effort needed to produce code with usage of automatic generators will be mentioned. But article will concentrate on problems with estimating systems dedicated for Internet. Such problems as estimation of value of graphic look and layout design of website, value of website addresses, value of links between sites and price of advertisement on WWW site will be considered.

In this article some unfair practices related to software pricing will be described. Firstly problem of designing certain solution for second and next time and influence of this fact on effort estimation and price will be considered. It will be supported with reference to PN-ISO 9000-3 standard which says:

“[…] The following aspects inherent to the design activities should be taken into account: […] Usage of past design experiences: utilizing lessons learned from past design experiences, the supplier should avoid recurrences of the same or similar problems”.

Then some unfair practices related to website business such as unfair increasing statistic visitors counters in order to overpricing advertisement, pre-buying popular website addresses, stealing website’s ideas and designs will be described.

From business point of view different methods of setting a price will be introduced: cost plus surcharge, cost plus enterprise expenses, price to obtain certain revenue or profit, average of market price, price below competitors, method “how much market can bear” and “ceiling” method.

As an conclusion methods of estimating effort and of setting a price will be compared and the gap between them will be discussed.

The main purpose of this article will be to prove an argument, that there exists fir software pricing method based on effort estimation.

Issues mentioned are ethical dilemmas existent in business and social environment. Statements of the article may influence conflicts on customer – producer cooperation on software market.

AUTHOR
Andrés Guadamuz González

ABSTRACT

“ENJOY THE POWER OF TEAMWORK”

This is the motto of Eminence, one of the many groups of Internet hackers that provide small applications for breaking copyright protection in computer software. Groups similar to this one are made up of individuals who are highly skilled in programming, probably even employed throughout the computer industry, but who spend large amounts of time and resources circumventing software defences to be able to provide free software. This is just one of the many examples of a new ethic that is on the increase thanks to the rise of the Internet, and which I call the “New Sharing Ethic”, which is opposed to traditional ideas of strong protection of ideas and of the proprietary nature of information.

The rise of the Internet has proved to be the perfect ground for this new sharing philosophy to develop because one of the basic ideas that gave birth to the Internet was the free flow of information.

Some of the best examples of the new sharing ethic can be seen throughout the often demonised hacker community. Contrary to common belief, there is actually a philosophy and a set of ethics followed by hackers throughout the Internet. Hacker philosophy is established by the fact that the Internet is a free medium that cannot be regulated; it is a virtual anarchy. In this scheme of things, the general feeling is that the Internet has no laws, but hackers achieve a sense of community in which sharing of information becomes essential. In fact, the first rule of hacker ethics actually states that “information-sharing is a powerful positive good, and that it is an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise by writing free software and facilitating access to information and to computing resources wherever possible”(1).

Hacker philosophy and ethics find their maximum expression in the Free Software Foundation (FSF). This is a project that advocates that all software should be free, and has actually made steps to prove that it is a possibility. This movement distributes free software and encourages programmers to use copyleft, which is a way in which software code is passed on, but anyone who redistributes the software, with or without changes, must pass along the freedom to further copy and change it. This places a burden to the person transferring the software; the burden is that the software must remain free. This is different from just placing software in the public domain because the person making use of the free code can subsequently copyright it.

This raises the question of whether or not this recent phenomenon of sharing is only a trend that can be seen in some extreme and anarchic Internet fringes. Mainstream users are also finding the benefits of the new ethics of sharing information, a myriad of people leave their computers on 24 hours a day to allow other Internet users to download anything from digital music to the latest movies from their hard drives using technologies like Napster or IRC chat servers, and yet these people are not earning a penny for their efforts. Many other users, including many academics, professionals and researches, provide help in specialised Usenet newsgroups in fields as varied as literature, law, astronomy, physics and biology. Knowledgeable users usually do not have any problems in providing help to less experienced newcomers. In message boards all across the Web, people are sharing ideas without and posting information knowing that they will not earn any copyright from their writings. It is also common to find pages where the information provided is made available to the public with the only requisite that the author is identified. Music groups, new writers and small software companies have no qualms about offering their creations for free over the Net, hoping that they will be noticed.

Perhaps the most successful example of the success of the sharing ethic is the open source code revolution spearheaded by the Linux operating system. Linux began as a hacker project by programmer Linus Torvald, who created a clone of the UNIX operating system and placed it on the Internet for free. The code has been subsequently improved many times, and being free, many companies are now distributing their own Linux version.

This new sharing ethic is the subject of the proposed paper, as the phenomenon raises some very interesting questions, which will be addressed directly. Is it ethical to share information that does not belong to you? What are the benefits of sharing information over the Internet? Are we witnessing the end of the ownership of ideas as we know it? Will this sharing ethic survive the increasing commercialisation of the Internet?

AUTHOR

Frances S. Grodzinsky
Computer Science Department
Sacred Heart University
Fairfield, Connecticut USA

Herman T. Tavani
Philosophy Department
Rivier College
Nashua, New Hampshire USA

ABSTRACT

During the last five years, the instances of cyberstalking-related crimes have proliferated. The 1999 US Attorney General’s Report to the Vice President [3] notes that although no formal statistics for cyberstalking-related crimes are yet available, some local law enforcement agencies have begun to see a rise in the number of reported cases of cyberstalking. That report cites three examples: (1) the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office, where approximately 20 percent of the roughly 600 cases handled by its Stalking and Threat Assessment Unit involved e-mail or other electronic communications; (2) the Sex Crimes Unit in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, which attributed about 20 percent of its cases to cyberstalking; and (3) the Computer Investigations and Technology Unit of the New York City Police Department which estimates that almost 40 percent of the caseload in the unit involves electronic threats and harassment. Virtually all of the reported cases of cyberstalking have occurred in the past three or four years. In addition, the report cites a study on sexual victimization of college women, conducted at the University of Cincinnati. In a national telephone survey of 4,446 randomly selected women attending two- and four-year institutions of higher education during the 1996-97 academic year, “581 women (13.1 percent) were stalked and reported a total of 696 stalking incidents. Of these, 166 (24.7 percent) involved e-mail. Thus, 25 percent of stalking incidents among college women could be classified as involving cyberstalking”[4].

Targets of cyberstalking get little help from either law enforcement agencies or civil courts because cyberstalking, as a form of criminal activity, is not yet taken seriously. Real life stalking laws are relatively new. In the US, for example, no laws against real life stalking, that is, stalking in physical space, were passed until 1990. “So in a country where targets of offline stalking are still told by the Police: ‘We are sorry, but we can’t do anything unless you get physically attacked,’ it is perhaps little wonder that stalking in virtual space gets even less respect”[2].

“Genuine computer crimes” have been defined as crimes that can be carried out only through the use of computer technology and only within the cyber realm. According to this definition, cyberstalking is not a genuine computer crime because criminal acts involving stalking need not involve computer technology, nor need they be restricted to cyberspace [1]. This, of course, does not imply that stalking activities in cyberspace are not serious crimes or that such criminal activities are any less serious than stalking activities that take place in physical space. Rather, it suggests that such crimes might be prosecuted under different legal statutes than those of cybercrime.

One might argue that any proposal to differentiate computer crimes into the categories of “genuine” vs. “non-genuine” computer crimes is too rigid a distinction, at least for practical purposes. This paper will investigate whether cyberstalking deserves special attention in ways other “non-genuine” computer crimes do not. Cyberstalking, an exploitative crime that typically targets women, is exacerbated both in terms of ease and scale by the Internet. This medium has also made possible certain forms of stalking-related behavior and activities that would not have been possible in the era of pre-computer technology.

We will illustrate some of the essential differences between offline and online stalking by focusing on such key issues as anonymity, distance, and “multiple harassment.” For example, a woman might not know that she is being stalked or not know the identity of who is stalking her — i.e., anonymous stalking is possible on the Internet. Does the possibility of anonymity in cyberspace encourage cyberstalking in those individuals who might think twice about stalking a person in physical space, given the confrontational aspect of the face-to-face act?

Also of importance to understanding significant differences between online- and offline-cyberstalking activities is an appreciation of the factor that distance vs. non-distance can play in the respective types of stalking. In cases involving “offline stalking,” the victim and aggressor are in the same geographic space. There, a woman may be able to get a court injunction against someone who physically stalks her. In the case of online stalking, however, there is no concept of distance. Also in cyberspace, there may not be any physical confrontation. Furthermore, offline stalking is generally a criminal act involving an individual against a victim. However, an online stalker can also engage others in the harassment of the targeted victim, because of the scope of electronic communication.

This study will assess some of the moral and legal issues associated with cyberstalking. We will examine the implications of issues such as privacy and free speech for cyberstalking. For example, we will consider how cyberstalking can violate the victim’s privacy and can protect that of the stalker; and how the stalker can be protected under free speech, especially if the postings are on Web sites that support violence against women. We will try to develop some answers to the following questions:

• Do we have any obligation to alert the potential victims of cyberstalking?
• What is the responsibility, if any, of those who read the cyberstalking postings to alert the person(s) being stalked?
• Is there a sense of “civil” online responsibility?
• Do, or should, ISP’s have any or should have any special responsibility in these matters?
• Should there be any liability attached?
• Which states in the US are taking steps to recognize the seriousness of cyberstalking and plan to introduce laws against it?
• Should we continue to have to wait until the stalking acts migrate to physical space before law enforcement agencies can legally move against a stalker?
• What happens if it is then too late?

We will use some cases to illustrate our points.

REFERENCES

1. Tavani, Herman T. “Defining the Boundaries of Computer Crime: Piracy, Break-Ins and Sabotage in Cyberspace,” Computers and Society, Vol. 30, No. 4, September 2000, pp. 3-9.
2. Hatcher, Colin Gabriel. CYBER STALKING. www.safetyed.org.
3. 1999 Report on cyberstalking: a new challenge for law enforcement and industry. www.cybercrime.gov.
4. Fisher, B. S., F. T. Cullen, J. Belknap, and M. G. Turner, “Being Pursued: Stalking Victimization in a National Study of College Women.” (From a forthcoming report on sexual violence against college women funded by the US Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice) referenced in [3].