Presentation in European Parliament

On Thursday, 18 November 2010, the CCSR director, Prof. B. Stahl gave a presentation on the ETICA project that he coordinates (www.etica-project.eu). This presentation took place in the context of a workshop on "Governance and Ethics of Emerging ICT and Security Technologie" organised by the European Commission.

The meeting was co-hosted by the European Parliament's Science and Technology Options Assessment panel (http://www.europarl.europa.eu/stoa/default_en.htm), which allowed it to be held in the European Parliament. Several members of European Parliament were present when the ETICA project and a number of related projects were discussed.

The purpose of the meeting was to provide input to policy makers and to prepare a further high-level meeting taking place on the 19th of November hosted by the European Commission. Prof Stahl represented DMU and the CCSR during this meeting as well.

Quality assurance and critical theory

A paper by CCSR members Mark Shaw and Bernd Stahl on "On Quality and Communication: The Relevance of Critical Theory to Health Informatics" has been accepted for a forthcoming special issue by the Journal of the Association for Information Systems on: Health Care IT: Process, People and Patients

The Journal of the Association for Information Systems is one of the top six journals in the area of information systems as identified by a group of senior scholars of the AIS.

This is the abstract of the paper:

Health information systems (HIS) require long-term investment before they provide a socio-economic return, yet their implementation remains problematic, possibly because the claims made about them appear not to sit well with healthcare professionals’ practice.

Health informatics should address these issues from a sound conceptual base, such as might be provided by critical theory, which seeks to identify hidden assumptions and ideologies. This discipline can provide a better understanding of the inner workings of socio-technical systems, with a view to improving them through the promotion of emancipation (allowing people to fulfil their potential).

Critical theory can also shed light on the problems with HIS and offer insight into remedies, for example by relating Habermas’ theories about communication to feedback, a concept central to quality assurance (QA). Such analysis finds that QA’s principal practices can be interpreted as emancipatory but requires organisations substantially to change their behaviour.

An alternate approach is to install HIS designed to support QA. Applying critical theory to these systems shows that they could become an active part of care delivery rather than static repositories of data, because they may encourage standardised conversations between all stakeholders about the important features of treatment. Success will depend on access for all participants to data entry and analysis tools, integration with work practice and use by staff and management in QA.

These ideas offer new directions for research into and the development of health information systems. The next step will be to implement and observe their technical and emancipatory properties.

e-Commerce in Developing Countries

CCSR members Fahad Aleid, Ben Fairweather and Simon Rogerson's paper on

"A consumers' perspective on E-commerce: practical solutions to encourage consumers' adoption of e-commerce in developing countries - A Saudi Arabian empirical study", 

originally presented at the Advanced Management Science (ICAMS), 2010 IEEE International Conference in July 2010 has been included in the IEEEXplore Digital Library as linked http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5552944.

CCSR blog

The Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility is a research centre of the Department of Informatics in the Faculty of Technology of De Montfort University in Leicester, UK. http://www.ccsr.cse.dmu.ac.uk/

This blog will cover issues related to the centre, both in terms of  relevant current events that touch upon computing and social responsibility and activities within the centre.