Introduction
Agenda
Registration
Networking
Venue
Submit questions
Request proceedings
Contacts
The Open Group

Social and Ethical Issues of Open Source

Preface

Open Source is a topic that is demanding the attention of senior executives. On June 24 and 25th, the University of St. Thomas and The Open Group will host a standards workshop in Minneapolis for senior business executives. This one-and-a-half day conference will include four panels covering business, technical, legal, and social/ethical issues. The conference will commence with an introduction of the issues and will conclude with a summary of the issues surfaced in the course of the panel discussions. The aim is to capture and publish the issues that are discussed in order to raise the industry awareness of the benefits and challenges of Open Source processes, technologies, and products.

Panel Objective

The Social – Ethical Issues Panel, moderated by Bill Estrem, University of St. Thomas will seek to understand and capture the following central issues about Open Source:

• How will Open Source technologies impact the enterprise from an organizational perspective?
• What are the ethical issues that must be resolved for Open Source technologies to be trusted for broader enterprise deployment?

The panel will answer and discuss moderated and ad hoc questions concerning the social and ethical aspects of the Open Source community and their potential impact on the fitness of Open Source products for use in enterprise information systems. Here are sample questions that could be used to begin the discussion:

• Understanding what the ‘big issues’ related to the Open Source community and its “hacker” culture.
  • To what extent can the self organizing teams in the Open Source community be motivated to focus efforts on the “right” projects?
  • Should enterprises encourage their employees to contribute/participate in Open Source projects that are relevant to enterprise requirements?
  • What are the factors that contribute to effective leadership of Open Source projects?
  • How can the collaborative methods employed by the Open Source communities be extended into other enterprise activities?
• Understanding the issues related to the credibility of Open Source technologies in commercial environments.
  • What are the fundamental governance principles that Open Source communities and vendors must observe to establish as basis for trust with enterprise customers?
  • Is it possible to establish a common ethical framework for guiding the behavior of Open Source communities?
  • How can the Open Source communities create a code of conduct that will enable customers to be assured the Open Source products that they deploy do not expose them to legal challenges?

Panelists

The panelists are:

1. Dr. Ken Goodpaster - University of St. Thomas
2. Peter Vaill - University of St. Thomas
3. Malcolm Reid - Medtronic

Panel Agenda

The panel session will be approximately 2 hours in length and follow the agenda below.

• Introduction by Bill Estrem (5 minutes max). Bill will provide background on the scope of the panel session, introduce the format, and then introduce the panelists.
• Introduction of each panel member and their opening positions (10 minutes each) (approximately 50 minutes). Each panelist introduce themselves further and then present a few slides that represent their observations the social and ethical issues related to the use of Open Source in the enterprise:
  • How will Open Source technologies impact the enterprise from an organizational perspective?
  • What are the ethical issues that must be resolved in for Open Source technologies to be trusted for broader enterprise deployment?
• Panel discussion with mixture of moderated questions and questions from audience (60 minutes). Bill will begin with a set of predefined questions based on the above list and then field questions from the audience.
• Thanks and close of Panel Session (5 minutes max)
• Conference Summary readout and discussion (30 minutes on day 2). Bill will summarize the key points and observations from the session. This session will include a discussion on potential next steps and recommendations based on the issues identified in all four panels.

Panel Participant Requirements

Each panelist should send presentations for their specific introduction and their opening positions. The presentations should be designed for 5 to 10 minutes. It is recommended the slides include:

• Introduction slide for the panelist
• Slide commenting on the organizational impacts of Open Source
• Slide commenting on the ethical issues related to Open Source

All the presentations will be preloaded in a master presentation and run from a single PC.

We encourage panelists to submit a brief paper that would be published along with post meeting documents, of course with full attribution to the contributor.

All panelists are encouraged to attend the full event, especially to participate in the summary discussion on the second day.