About this Site
- About the Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science (OEC) and its History
- A Guide to the Materials and Structure of the OEC
- Advisors to the Online Ethics Center
- The Current Project Team
- Awards
- The Online Ethics Center Glossary
- is a searchable glossary of ethical terms in general use. (It is not intended to introduce technical terms from philosophical or other disciplines, but to clarify widely used ethical notions.)
- Abbreviations and Acronyms for Organizations and Agencies
- An Index of the OEC pages by topic
- Search the OEC
About the Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science
The Online Ethics Center for Engineering was established in the fall of 1995 under a grant (#SBR-9511862) from the National Science Foundation, and currently operates under NSF grant #SES-04285971. Prior to obtaining the NSF grant, the prototype OEC was funded with seed money given by Raymond Stata, President of Analog Devices. Harry E. Bovay; Jr., President of Mid-South Telecommunications Company contributed funds for transition to NAE and continuing core support.The mission of the Ethics Center is to provide engineers, computer scientists and engineering students with resources useful for understanding and addressing ethically significant problems that arise in their work life. The Center is also intended to serve teachers of engineering and computer science students who want to include discussion of ethical problems closely related to technical subjects as a part of computer science and engineering courses, or in free-standing subjects in professional ethics or in research ethics for such students.
The OEC became an activity of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in March 2007 as part of its new Center for Engineering Ethics, which starts up in April 1, 2007 (No kidding.) Its full name was shortened to the Online Ethics Center for Engineering, but you can continue to call us by our short acronym, OEC.
In designing the Center pages, we have put a premium on speed of loading. This feature is sacrificed only for graphics with high content. The pages themselves were created primarily by students, first at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and from 1997 to 2006 at Case Western Reserve University. These students have had many invaluable contributions to the design and maintenance of the Center. Furthermore, thanks to Andrew Penry, Andrew Roksandic, Toni Thayer, and Laura Simna, the new NAE OEC will have a capacity for distributed content creation (content creation at many campuses). More information about that will be available from the NAE Engineering Ethics Center. Of course, conceptually, the Online Ethics Center has no physical locale: it exists just as much in Europe as it does in America. Cyberspace allows one to transcend space and time.
The OEC has a distinguished group of advisors who consult on the development of the Center. They come from a variety of disciplines in addition to engineering and science, including philosophy, psychology, history, and sociology, and include individuals with oversight responsibilities for ethical behavior for professional societies, corporations, and government agencies, as well as academics.
The students who first staffed the OEC had assisted Caroline Whitbeck in her work under an NSF grant to the ECSEL engineering coalition and created the pages that now form the Diversity section of the OEC. That student team was led by Heidi Ashih. It included Marlon Buchanan, Jagruti Patel, Juliet Midgley and Xiaobo Li. Marlon Buchanan was the Center's first Web master. This team created the first of the ECSEL pages that now form the Diversity section of the OEC.
The OEC moved to Case Western Reserve University with Caroline Whitbeck, when she became the first Elmer G. Beamer-Hubert H. Schneider Professor in Ethics. There the student team was headed by Anila Jahangiri. Michael Melamed mad many both technical and content contributions to the site, as did Jonathan Wehner, after him. Francy Acosta also headed the team for a while and created and maintained the Spanish language pages.
Later, Amanda Shaffer and then Toni Thayer ably provided staff support as Site Manager and Site Editor. Andrew Penry, first as an undergraduate and then as a Web consultant researched accessibility issues for website and then oversaw the transformation of the site into a W3C/WAI accessible site. Subsequently, he created a sophisticated database content management system for the OEC. (This system was later converted to a new cms to run on Windows system software used by the NAE.) Andrew Roksandic has handled all other technical issues for the OEC since fall 2002 and made major contributions to the operations of the OEC. Laura Simna managed the student team during Toni Thayer's maternity leave and contributed immeasurably to the smooth running of the OEC.
The Center is updated continuously, but it has "growth spurts," primarily in January and in the summer. The project team is happy to have your comments and suggestions whenever you care to make them.
Advisors to the Online Ethics Center
The OEC has benefited from advice of an expert group of advisors including:
- Stephanie J. Bird
- C. E. “Ed" Harris.
- Joseph R. Herkert
- Deborah G. Johnson
- Michael C. Loui
- Robert McGinn
- Francis Macrina
- Keith Miller
- Carl Mitcham
- Steven P. Nichols
- Helen Nissenbaum
- Michael Pritchard
- the late Roland Schinzinger
- Jimmy H. Smith
- Stephen H. Unger
- Vivian Weil
- the late Joseph Wujek
The Current Project Team
- Director, Caroline Whitbeck,
- Administrative Assistant, Renee Holland
- Site Manager, Laura Simna (student team member)
- Site Editor, Toni K. Thayer
- Web Master and Technical Support, Andrew Roksandic (student team member)
- 1.The material in this site is based upon work originally supported by the National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Awards
