Concept Review Module on Geospatial Ethics from the GeoTech Center

We have written extensively about ethics in this blog over the years, and for good reason–ethics is intertwined with location-based decisions, mapping is a powerful means of communications, and location is inherently a very personal issue. Another key resource is the ethics concept review module from the GeoTech Center, an initiative I have been supporting for nearly 20 years. GeoTech Center’s mission is to foster and support the use of geospatial technology in community colleges, but in my opinion their resources can be used in other educational contexts and even outside education. My colleague Ann Johnson has created a set of slides and a video that delves into key aspects of why and how ethics is important in GIS.

Ann begins with defining ethics as a “multidimensional conundrum”, including such thought-provoking questions of “is it doing good and not doing bad?”, “is it unethical to ignore an issue that you judge to be bad?”, “would all cultures agree on what constitutes ethical or unethical behaviors?”, “does the act have to be illegal to qualify as unethical”?, “are ethics the same for an individual, an organization, a government or a society?”, among other questions. Ann then discusses how ethics have been enforced, the impact that digital mapping has had on ethics, the impacts of professional technology as a profession, oaths vs licenses vs codes vs personal standards, and numerous useful links to such thoughtful resources as a proposed hippocratic oath for scientists. In this oath are rigor, respect, responsibility, and transparency (be honest and admit if you don’t know the answers). Ann then discusses certification programs in GIS and some ways ethics can and should be threaded into a geospatial curriculum.

One of my favorite components are the case study questions. These are excellent ways to introduce why ethics matters in geospatial technology and education and could foster good discussion with colleagues or among students. These include “A GIS analyst is asked to exclude pertinent data from maps prepared for a public hearing”, “researchers track mobile phone users’ movements to derive predictive models of human mobility”, “too few software licenses are available in the aftermath of a tsunami”, and others from this Penn State study. Ann also discusses data–permission, source, citing, availability, and sharing–topics germane to this Spatial Reserves data blog, our book, and visualization techniques, output formats, and other topics that touch on ethics.

I invite you to use this resource in your organization or in your instruction and invite your comments below.

Part of the ethics concept review module from the GeoTech Center.

–Joseph Kerski