I’ve recently re-watched Uncle Bob’s lesson on clean code (YouTube video that opens in new window) and have to reflect on it with my passion for accessibility and digital production. This blog post will therefore be a bit philosophical, but I still hope you will like it.
Ethics in digital production is not mainstream
As you can probably understand from Uncle Bob’s video – developers still have to agree on the ethics of their work. I agree. Nobody I ever talked with never mentioned ethics to me when I had to either plan, develop, maintain or write for the web. The only ethic that came to my mind was unspoken and it was to be fair when estimating, working and then charging for my work.
I’ve worked as a volunteer webmaster (when that was still a title), freelance one-in-all designer-developer, an employee of international company and an employee of private company, consultant to both public and private sector and sole proprietor. And I don’t remember a case when a boss, project manager, client, peer mentioned ethic rules to me.
When studying in high school, and on different universities I’ve never stumbled upon the subject of ethics, so it was only my curiosity that have lead me to at least thinking about it. And I can therefore also conclude that ethics in development, even wider – in digital production – doesn’t really seem mainstream and that is actually a big thing.
Even Uncle Bob asks some rhetoric questions about it;
- What is our (developers) ethics?
- Do we (developers) have a stated set of ethics?
- Do we have a set of moral standards that all programmers follow?
- Do programmers take an oath to uphold a set of standards, a set of ethics?
And he concludes that without ethics we can actually not talk about a profession of programmers. The same can easily be applied to any other field that has to do with digital production.
What would I include in ethics for digital production
Well, I can start with the obvious parts that and maybe try to brainstorm outside of my zone of comfort as well – by no order at all;
- Accessibility and inclusion (to not discriminate people with disabilities will always be there on any list I will make) – a shared effort of designers, developers, content creators, testers and actually everybody else.
- Security – that is one of the corner stones of any digital product.
- Privacy – goes hand in hand with security but we should also avoid tracking too much.
- Transparency – openness, integrity and cooperation – beneficial for all.
- Accountability – product meets specifications, passes tests, giving credits to others and for example writing clean code, preventing dark design patterns, progressive enhancement,…
- Continuous learning and mentoring – knowledge is power and sharing is caring.
I guess this list covers the main aspects and I am sure you can still add some additional ones. Just wanted to write my reflections here, before I dedicate some time to study other sources.
