Progress Towards a World-Wide Code of Conduct

In this paper, the work of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Task Force on Ethics is described and the recommendations presented to the General Assembly are reviewed. While a common code of ethics or conduct has not been recommended for consideration by the member societies of IFIP, a set of guidelines for the establishment and evaluation of codes has been produced and procedures for the assistance of code development have been established within IFIP. This paper proposes that the data collected by the Task Force and the proposed guidelines can be used as a tool for the study of codes of practice providing a teachable, learnable educational module in courses related to the ethics of computing and computation, and looks at the next steps in bringing ethical awareness to the IT community.