WWW Ethics Center for Engineering and Science

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This support will maintain and continue to develop the World Wide Web Ethics Center for Engineering & Science and plan for the expansion of its use and usefulness. A diverse student team under the direction of the present principal investigator, who is advised by a-distinguished advisory board, will continue to carry on the work of the Center in the renewal-period. Conference activities will be supported through Case Western-Reserve's Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities. In the twenty-eight months of its-existence the Center has grown rapidly into a substantial and well-organized-site of over 1,500 pages. The following sections are available from the main page: Research Ethics, Ethical Codes and Guidelines, Moral Leaders, Solving Problems, Ethics in a Corporate Setting, Diversity, Essays, and Instructional Resources. Also on that page are links to a keyword index, a bibliography, a glossary of terms, and an organization/acronym list, as well as information about the site and other sites on science and engineering ethics, and a search engine. Use has doubled three times since May 1995, and the time interval required for-doubling continues to decrease. The Center now averages over 1,500 requests for pages per day and 6,000 to 7,500 distinct hosts access the Center each month.--Some of the objectives for the renewal period are similar to previous accomplishments, such-as:--operational improvements to further facilitate response and-reliability of the site;-updating of the bibliography, the indexes, and the keywords, and further linking of the-glossary to new and existing pages, and the addition of other hypermedia enhancements; ongoing response to user requests and comments;-creation of new cases, essays and commentaries.--The special objectives for this renewal period are to develop a plan for the overall focus of the Center, for evaluation, and for the development of on-going support. Novel objectives for the renewal period are those designed to introduce scholars and other-potential contributors to a more active role in creating educational resources and exchanging ideas-through this unique Ethics Center. These initiatives will meld modalities familiar to academics with-exploitation of the special capabilities of the WWW. Prominent among these initiatives will be-jointly sponsored conferences on topics in science and engineering ethics, the proceedings of-which will be made available in the WWW Ethics Center.