Public lecture by Coraline Ada Ehmke: "Four Reasons to Not Care about Ethics in Open Source"
January 28, 2025
2 p.m. Mountain Time
Are we, as technologists, responsible for how our work impacts society?
In a 2022 paper, researcher David Widder published a study on the justifications given by open source deepfake developers when asked about the moral implications of their work. Four main arguments were made by the developers to deny their ethical responsibility: the Freedom Zero argument, the Open argument, the Tech is Just a Hammer argument, and the Inevitability argument. But do any of these justifications really ring true, or are they comforting fictions that separate us from the real-world impact of our work?
Coraline Ada Ehmke is an internationally recognized tech ethicist, activist, and software engineer. For more than a decade, she's worked on practical approaches to promoting the values of diversity, equity, and justice in the technology industry, with a particular focus on open source. She is the creator of Contributor Covenant, the first and most popular code of conduct for digital communities, and the Hippocratic License, an innovative software license designed to promote and protect human rights. Coraline co-founded the
Organization for Ethical Source and serves as its Executive Director.
Boulder book launch: Beautiful Solutions
February 4, 2025
6:30 p.m. Mountain Time
Trident Booksellers & Cafe
Our problems are global and interconnected, and our solutions must be too. The stories featured in this new anthology amplify ancestral and community wisdom to help us all imagine a different way of doing things. With over 70 contributors, this toolbox of collective wisdom and know-how shows us that another world is not only possible, it’s already under construction.
Co-editor Nathan Schneider, MEDLab's director, will introduce the book. He'll be joined by leaders in the Colorado solidarity economy, who will talk about their work:
- Yessica Holguin (Center for Community Wealth Building)
- Minsun Ji (Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center)
Details at the Trident website.
Primer: "How to Build Governable Spaces for Online Communities"
A new essay from MEDLab director Nathan Schneider:
I’ve seen it again and again: A group gets started, gets working on something good an important, and then falls apart because some internal conflict arises. During the early days of Covid-19, mutual aid projects appeared in many towns and neighborhoods to help people help each other through a difficult time. It was inspiring. But in the years since, I have kept hearing stories of how what I then feared came to pass. When the initial excitement wore off, or when donations declined, little and big disagreements tore most of those groups apart.
In what follows, I’ll suggest a series of steps for how online communities can set themselves up for healthy problem-solving. This is not a complete program or a universal script, but it can serve as a checklist of questions that you can apply to your particular context. You should decide what is most relevant.
Read the rest at the MEDLab website.
Radio: How has racism held back economic democracy?
MEDLab's radio show, Looks Like New, comes out the fourth Thursday of every month on KGNU, 88.5 FM, or online as a podcast. Last month's episode is now available:
How connected is the struggle for racial justice and the fight for a democratic economy? How has racism hindered the fight, and how can activists work together for a better future on both fronts? This month on, Looks Like New, MEDlab director Nathan Schneider hosted a group conversation of 100+ guests to understand these questions. This event hosted Jason Spicer, an assistant professor at Baruch College’s Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, and findings from his recently published book, Co-Operative Enterprise in Comparative Perspective: Exceptionally Un-American. This presentation is followed by a response from Jessica Gordon Nembhard of John Jay College, whose book Collective Courage is the definitive history of the African-American cooperative. This event seeks to broadcast just how much racism has actively held back the future of a democratic economy. Both Jason Spicer and Jessica Gordan Nembhard stress how important knowing the connection between a democratic economy and the struggle for racial justice is.
Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or directly through our website. You can also follow the show on Instagram, Mastodon, and X.
