The International Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP) and the Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) are the two special interest groups of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) that are working toward developing research ethics and community norms. However, research ethics and community norms are still lacking in the context of accessing publicly available data in the areas of human-computer interaction (HCI) and social computing. This paper addresses this issue.

The authors include more than 50 references covering more than two pages of this four-page paper. They introduce the ACM SIGCHI research ethics committee, focusing on social and collaborative computing systems or computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), with inputs from the GROUP research community to develop an understanding of different perspectives of ethics. Further, the authors mention two purposes of this committee: highlighting work of the ACM SIGCHI research ethics committee to GROUP participants, and unprecedented and dedicated involvement of GROUP participants with SIGCHI themes. The main highlights are the questions provided in the background section, which include, “What constitutes ‘public’ data, and are there circumstances in which studying content created by humans becomes human subject research? What are researchers’ obligations to follow Terms of Service for websites? Is it acceptable to study deleted content? What are best practices for obtaining informed consent or appropriately anonymizing data collected online?”

The authors stress public scrutiny of methods and ethics with respect to best research practices in HCI and social computing. They further mention issues including participatory design issues of cognitive, emotional, physical, or social challenges; the situation of refugees and migrants, “feminism, and CSCW; integrating overlapping or intersectional issues of gender, sexual orientation, and power; and contextualizing issues, such as social justice, colonial violence, and issues of social good.”

This is an interesting read for research communities working in the area of structuring community norms and formulating research ethics, and specifically for researchers working in HCI and social computing research. The authors’ attention toward theory-and-practice approaches and research-and-practice directions makes this paper worth reading.