BoardFamily – design ethics questions around a collaborative online community

Abstract

The purpose of this design case is to raise questions and open a dialogue about design ethics for projects in online communities. Boardfamily is a web community inspired by semantics and knowledge-based systems that investigate how information is transferred between groups of people. Boardfamily provides a community platform with a set of rich tools that visualize how people are connected. Design plays a critical role in the development of large-scale collaborative information systems. These systems present design with new opportunities and challenges to investigate new research and methodologies. The role that interactive designers play in creating new types of civil space online raise ethical questions about how to best create these new public spaces, provide relevance through reputation and enable collaboration between people.