Code of Conduct

A set of rules for good behavior or proper practices according to the

social norms, which the group of people who undersign it should adhere to. For instance,
the code of conduct of the Institute of IT Professionals South Africa (IITPSA).
Code of Ethics Similar to Code of Conduct, but then more general than just those rules included in a
code of conduct.

Computer ethics
A branch of applied philosophy that looks at how computing professionals
should make decisions about processes (e.g., the programming) or products (e.g., an app,
the device).

Conclusion
is that statement in an argument that is said to be true and follows from the
Premises.

Creative commons
A way to legally share on the Web one’s intellectual property and copyright on creative works.

Critical reasoning is a branch of informal logic with which one can assess and analyze the
arguments that occur in ‘every day’ natural language discourse.

Deductive argument
If the premises are true, then the truth of the conclusion is guaranteed
(thanks to the rules of inference).

Digital colonialism refers to the practice that organisations (mainly tech companies) collect
and process data from users residing in the Global South for the purpose of exploitation and profit. They
then offer services for payment—informed by the data given for
free—and push for infrastructural domination while the profits go to those foreign tech
companies rather than local ones.

Digital convergence
is the trend toward using one device for a range of multimedia uses
that used to have separate devices; e.g., watching streaming tv on a computer rather than
a TV set, sending emails with your phone rather than from a desktop computer.

Digital footprint
The ‘breadcrumbs’ trace of data that companies of websites store about
your online behaviour, such as which sites you visited, for how long, what you did on
their site, and so on.

Echo chamber
effect in the context of the Web and social media, it refers to the situation
where a user only or mostly sees beliefs or opinions that agree with their own, rather than
be exposed to diverse views, which has as effect that their ideas are reinforced.

Ethics
is a set of morally permissible standards of a group that each member of the group (at
his/her rational best) wants every other member to follow even if their doing so would
mean that he/she must do the same.

Fallacy
indicates faulty reasoning. There are many such ‘traps’; e.g. the fallacy of appeal to
authority, and an ad hominem attack (discrediting the person rather than the argument).
Filter bubble What you see in the search results of a search engine (or feeds in social media)
is determined by your prior interaction, rather than a non-personalized page
Free software
is software that is free, with ‘free’ in the sense of liberty, not price. This means
one has the freedom not just to run the software, but also copy, distribute, study, change
and improve it. Free software is open source, but open source software is not necessarily
also free.

Inductive argument
the truth of the premises makes the conclusion more probably true.
Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) seeks to
bridge, or narrow the gap of, the Digital divide.

Information and Communication Technology for Peace (ICT4Peace)

aims to support peace keeping and peace building efforts for post-conflict and post-disaster
reconstruction toward positive peace.

Intellectual property
refers to a range of rights of ownership of an (intangible) asset such
as a software program, the idea behind it, or some functionality of it. For software, there
are four types relevant: patents, copyrights, trade secrets, and trademarks. Its objectives
are to promote progress, a fair exchange for mutual benefit for its creator(s) and society,
and to create an incentive for inventors and authors to create and disclose their work.

Killer robots Catchy term for Autonomous Weapons Systems.

Laws of robotics Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov devised three laws with as aim to regulate what
robots are allowed to do, being:
1) A robot may not injure a human being or,
through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm;
2) A robot must obey the orders
given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law;
3)A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with
the First or Second Laws.

Moral agency
is determined by meeting several conditions, typically: i) whether
the ethically relevant result is an outcome of the agent’s actions (i.e., causality); ii) whether
the agent had or should have had knowledge of the consequences of its actions; and iii)
whether the agent could choose another option (generally considered as to be without
greater harm for the agent). When at least one of the three conditions is absent, one is,
generally, not held morally responsible for the act.

Moral theory is a way of defining Morality and provides guidance to answer the two principal questions
of how one knows X is good, and why it is good. For instance, one can base it on cultural relativism or
religion or that the consequence matter most (instead of
the motivation behind it).

Morality is the set of standards everyone (every rational person at his/her rational best)
wants everyone else to follow even if their following them means having to do the same.

Net neutrality
is the principle that all data packets sent over the Internet are treated equally.

Normative statement explores what people ought to do. They are prescriptive and they try
to provide an account of why certain behaviors are good/bad or right/wrong. Compare
with Descriptive statement.

Open Source Software Software of which the source code is publicly available.
Its copyright holder provides people the rights to study, modify, and (re)distribute the code to anyone.
Policy vacuum
The speed of innovations outpaces the slowness of devising policies and
laws how to deal with the new technologies, leaving a ‘vacuum’ where events and practices
occur. These events and practices, while unintentionally not illegal, may still be unethical
or immoral.

Premise a statement that is being offered as a reason for believing the truth of the Conclusion
of an Argument.

Privacy
The person’s [right to/ability to/state of] being secluded from other people, having
control over information about oneself.
Problem of ‘many hands’ refers to the situation where multiple actors are involved in the
development and deployment of technologies, which makes it hard to identify who exactly
did what. This negatively affects the process of assigning blame when a technological
accident occurs, as well as who to praise for its success.

Surveillance capitalism
refers to a business model where “profits derive from the unilateral
surveillance and modification of human behavior” made possible by the advances in IT
hardware and software, as formulated by Zuboff (2016).

Trustworthy software
is defined as the enhancement of the overall software and systems
culture, with the objective that software should be designed, implemented and maintained in a
trustworthy manner

Artificial Intelligence
A branch in computer science and IT that concerns the theory and
development of computer systems that can carry out tasks that normally requires human
intelligence, i.e., to simulate ‘intelligent’ behaviour in computers. This include subfields
that focus on techniques for learning and reasoning using, among others, logic, statistics,
language.

Cloud computing
refers to services hosted on large data centres (including ‘server farms’)
offered over the Internet. Such as collection of devices are presented to the user as if it is
one entity that is used for data storage and computation by software applications that are
run remotely.

Conceptual data model

An implementation-independent model of the data that has to be
stored and processed within the application domain; e.g., a UML Class Diagram.

Data analytics
processing and analysing large amounts of data starting from some hypothesis, and its results are
typically used for decision-making.

Data mining
refers to the process of exploration and analysis of large amounts of data by
automatic or semi-automatic means so as to discover meaningful patterns and rules.

Database
is a structured collection of data such that it facilitates easy manipulation and
retrieval of that data by a database management system (the software processing the text
file), such as the Open source software PostgreSQL.
Internet of Things adds to the common Internet the connectivity of devices that are not
regarded as computers but that do have embedded electronics so that they can be interacted with
remotely, including, e.g., sensors, fridges, smart home appliances like a security
system.
Linked Data Structured data on the Web that can be linked across different sources, i.s.,
facilitate information integration, and be queried as one big graph. See also Semantic Web.
Localisation This refers mostly to localisation of software, meaning, at least, the translation
of terms used in an application’s interface into the language spoken where that software
is used, and other features, such as spelling and grammar checking for one’s language
and autocomplete for words in one’s language. Hardware localisation manifests itself
practically for endusers as different keyboard layouts.
Machine Learning focuses on algorithms to achieve good predictions based on large amounts
of training data. See also Data mining and Data analytics.
Reasoning, automated a way to infer implicit knowledge from explicitly represented information, using
the rules of inference together with a logic in which the information is
represented and a set of algorithms that automate this process.
Web 2.0 The Web with m:n information flow between entities, such as blogs with comments,
forums integrated in webpages, social media sites to share information with friends. This
contrasts with the ‘first generation’ Web that was just 1:n information flow between an
information provider and many consumers.
Web 3.0 See: Semantic Web.
Semantic Web The Web with meaning added to it (cf. plain text in HTML files and just
keywords), where the meaning is represented formally and one can make inferences automatically.
Linked Data is a component of the Semantic Web.