Your “Planning for an Inevitable Future” article resonated with my recent experiences working in the commercial IT world and I think are indicative of the need for change in our own perspective. I remember a projection (source forgotten, but from the 1970’s or 1980’s) that, given the growth rate of programming, by the early 21st century everyone on earth would have to be a programmer. Well, I think we’re there – but in a different form.
In your article you mentioned technology-driven social changes, but I see them as technology-enabled social changes. People are no longer being given tightly constrained tools to work with, they are being given building blocks from which they assemble their own systems and interact with one another in an ad-hoc manner, thereby defining and creating their own experiences.
In assembling their own systems in this ad-hoc manner, people are making design decisions – often without understanding the consequences. Consider, for example, the issues of security, trust, and identity. Every time a user clicks on a link, they are (to some extent) trusting the identity claim (the label on the link) and trusting the system at the other end of the link not to do anything untoward to their environment and data. They are also trusting that the little padlock security icon to indicate that the communications is, itself, secure.
Using this as a narrow example, I see an expanded role for the CS to help educate the broader public about concepts like these and what they mean in their everyday lives. Most of the available plain-language material on these topics comes from vendors pushing products and services. It’s biased, often heavily slanted, and is surrounded by the marketing/sales hype associated with the products or services. It’s nearly impossible to find a simple layman’s description. IEEE CS, in this respect, could be a trusted neutral source of factual information – if we build the IEEE CS brand recognition.
A possible venue for communications in this regard might be Wikipedia. Plain-language explanations of concepts important to the general public, backed by references to the more technical underpinnings, could be a starting point for discussing what are really some complex social issues. The relationship between identity and identity authorities, and the implicit trust in the authority is something everyone ought to understand. Not the technical issues (which tend to be the focus of our discussions), but the societal ones. What constitutes an authority that can be trusted? Why do you need identifiers? How are identifiers associated with individuals? How can this association be validated?
Lying at the core of this are some very touchy political issues whose discussion often lacks a sound factual basis. A national identifier is, in this country, a political anathema. Yet it is not hard to make the case that without a reliable identifier for individuals and organizations, interactions with third parties always carries a significant element of risk. The more such issues are clearly understood, the better decisions people can make – both in their own ad-hoc systems designs and in the political and social decisions they make.
I have picked on security to illustrate the concept, but more and more the broad user community is becoming the de-facto system architect and engineer. I think there is an important role for the IEEE CS to play in helping them understand, in plain language, the design decisions they are making and their potential consequences.
I hope the concept is clear – I just jotted this off-the-cuff.
? PCB
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Paul C. Brown
Principal Software Architect
TIBCO Software Inc.
Email: pbrown@tibco.com Mobile: 518-424-5360
Yahoo:pbrown12_12303 AIM: pcbarch
"Total architecture is not a choice - it is a concession to reality."
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