[Savannah-register-public] [task #4215] Submission of Ethics search protocol

[Bernhard Fastenrath]

URL:
  <http://savannah.gnu.org/task/?func=detailitem&item_id=4215>

                 Summary: Submission of Ethics search protocol
                 Project: Savannah Administration
            Submitted by: fasten
            Submitted on: Thu 06/02/2005 at 09:13
         Should Start On: Thu 06/02/2005 at 00:00
   Should be Finished on: Sun 06/12/2005 at 00:00
                Category: Project Approval
                Priority: 5 - Normal
                  Status: None
                 Privacy: Public
        Percent Complete: 0%
             Assigned to: None
             Open/Closed: Open
                  Effort: 0.00

    _______________________________________________________

Details:


Site Admin. Approval/Edition URL:
 <https://savannah.gnu.org/admin/groupedit.php?group_id=7680>


###### ORIGINAL SUBMISSION DETAILS ######

System Group Name:
-----------------
  esp


Full Name:
----------
  Ethics search protocol
  

Type:
-----
  non-GNU software & documentation


License:
-------- 
  GNU General Public License V2 or later


Other License: 
--------------
  


Description:
------------
  An ethics-enabled search engine can act as a complement to the well-known
price search engines and turn ethical considerations into an easily
advertisable advantage. A search engine can store imprint and ethics of
organizations that publish them and allow users to find organizations
adhering to the desired ethics and also to verify these ethics or the public
feedback of organizations or individuals that verify those ethics and an
organization's adherance to its ethics in detail.

Users of this system can demand ethics and support non-government
organization that try to uphold environmental, social or other ethics.
Gathering data from user profiles is expected from search engines as users
specify the ethics they are looking for and the policy providers,
certification agents and verification agents they would like to see.

A search engine must return hits according to the quality of matching ethics,
if no other criteria was specified to supercede this.

Unsatisfied users can post tickets in a well-defined format to policy
providers or verification agents to remind policy implementors to adhere to
the ethics they have published. Policy providers and verification agents can
declare a published ethics.xml document as invalid. Mediators can be used to
mediate in case of dispute.

Policies can implement policy schemes (inherting the structure of an empty
policy) or extend another policy that has not been declared final. A final
policy is not open to be extended. Extending a policy means that paragraphs
can be overridden or appended. The described inheritance is similar to
inheritance in the Java language.

Policies should be structured to describe concisely what is required by a
policy, not why it is required or how it is to be implemented. It should be
considered good style to add links to external web pages describing the why
and how to every paragraph that requires further explanations. Explanations
should preferrably come in different degrees of verbosity and sophistication
but aim to explain the connection to Kant's Categorical Imperative.



Other Software Required:
------------------------
  GnuPG
GCJ



Other Comments:
---------------
  Motivation

Teaching ethics properly in school, while this is wise to do, is of limited
use when people in their everyday life do not get a chance to uphold ethical
standards. It is easy to ignore or forget things that cannot be (easily)
applied to your daily live. Many religious ethics offer examples for this
kind of problem: Demands that are too difficult to apply and while they sound
nice they somehow do not apply to your daily life.

Most of us are today surrounded by offers of unknown ethical quality. The
verification of production standards is often impossible and where
governmental or third party standards exist there is a strong tendency to
undermine these standards by discount outlets. One problem is that consumers
seldom get the chance to communicate ethical requirements because the proper
communication channels does not exist and many producers prefer to measure
consumer preferences with a one dimensional scale, the sales.

This project has the goal to offer an open source specification and
implementation for that missing communication channel. 


#########################################







    _______________________________________________________

Reply to this item at:

  <http://savannah.gnu.org/task/?func=detailitem&item_id=4215>

_______________________________________________
  Message sent via/by Savannah
  http://savannah.gnu.org/