Florian is a Design Lead at Siili and solves problems on the open web. He prefers Ruby over PHP, Coffeescript over Javascript, beer over bubbly, open source over proprietary software, bike over car, work over meetings, small over big, action over talk, learning over degrees and his family over everything.
We love to think of ourselves as careless hackers, but the truth is that we hold very real responsibilites towards our users, customers, our societies and finally ourselves. Responsibilities we just to easily ignore or forget while working in a virtual domain. The past year has made it painfully clear that we can no longer set aside the question of ethics. This talk will discuss accessibility, security and personal freedom in a new, harsh reality.
We — as community — hold the ‘hacker mindset’ in high esteem. To try, play, break, glue and “hack” is considered acceptable strategy due to it’s highly creative component. We value creativity above all other and not rarely throw caution in the wind in order to be able to discover, invent and finally progress. While this attitude has certainly proven successful and is well defendable as method, the truth is that many of us aren’t tinkerers by profession. We paid to be thoughtful designers, programmers, planners — the architects of the internet, of a global promise of inconceivable proportions and being an architect comes with a whole set of responsibilities the “hacker” in us doesn’t have to deal with. Responsibilities large and small we tend to ignore, to forget throughout our stressful working days or simply aren’t aware of at all.
With the ongoing scandal surrounding the seemingly unlimited abuse of infrastructure by the big security agencies around the globe our industry faces an unprecedented loss of trust in our services and products. It’s time to stop pointing at the big players and to realize that we are part of the game and that we ourselves have taken on a few very real responsibilities with our jobs.
For this talk I have tried to gather some of these responsibilities I myself tend to forget, I’ve seen ignored in my work environment or the industry at large and to remind us towards whom we’re responsible and to find ways on how we can live up to our promises.
Focusing on ethics, this presentation will consider different and easily forgotten responsibilities towards:
We will discuss questions in the areas of health, equality, accessibility, security and personal freedom. Each section will explain how and why we as web workers carry certain responsibilities, why we should care, how and when (and why) we tend to neglect them and what we can do to be more mindful in our daily jobs.
I’m active in the Ruby and web community as organizer as well as speaker and teacher and I guess it’s the Ruby community’s permanent drive to become a more mindful version of itself that really makes me want to talk about subjects like this. The past months have made me realize just how much weight we as web developers carry on our shoulders and how difficult some of the slowly arising questions of ethics and responsibility actually are to answer. Yet, not enough discussion seems to be happening within the wider web development community and I’d love to do my bit to change that.
I’ve been working on the web for almost ten years and made my way from a visual designer across a few languages toward a polyglot, full-fledged web worker.
You can find some of the slides of presentations I’ve given and courses I’ve taught at Speakerdeck (https://speakerdeck.com/polarblau) and some more information and links on my site: http://polarblau.com/ . I spoke most recently at eurucamp (http://2013.eurucamp.org/speakers) in Berlin and Webshaped (http://webshaped.fi/speakers) in Helsinki. For the latter you can find a video at Vimeo as well already: http://vimeo.com/71019924 .