Ethique et l'intégrité collecte données

Titre : Ethique et intégrité de la collecte et du partage des données - science citoyenne et autres projets d'Open Science

Titre VO IETF=[en-US] : Ethics and Integrity of Data Collection and Sharing - citizen science and other open science projects

Intervenant : Puneet Kishor

Lieu : RMLL2015 - Beauvais

Date : Juillet 2015

Durée : 47'10"

Lien vers la la vidéo

00' J'essaye, MO, cqfd93, CBA

Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre. Beauvais 2015

Présentateur : Eh bien, nous allons commencer la conférence suivante et Corinne tu es avec nous, tout va bien. Je donne la parole. Ah, votre microphone est ici. Your microphone is there. I shall not translate.

Puneet Kishor: What's that?

Présentateur: I shall not translate, because...

Puneet Kishor: That's OK, OK.

Présentateur : Ça va pour l’anglais tout le monde ?

Puneet Kishor: I apologize, I am going to talk in English. but it will give you a chance to practice your English with me. My French is much worse than your English, you don't want me to be doing that anyway. This is going to be a very different presentation, I think, from most of the presentations you've been hearing. Most of them has been about software. This is about matter issues, bigger issues, not bigger, I don't mean more noble but bigger in terms of more complicated issues about ethics and integrity and what we can or cannot, or should or should not do.

So hopefully you will find this of interest and I will want your reactions to that. It's very good that the conservation, if I understand correctly, ended with a little bit of talk about terms of services and licenses ???, is that right? I can have got that, you now, my French is not good and my Spanish is not good and I don't know any Portuguese but I could get that much little bit.

I actually used to work for an organization called Creative Commons. How many people have heard of Creative Commons?

I am surprised that there are few people who have not heard of Creative Commons. Creative Commons is the organization that makes copyright licenses, one of which is actually [NdT:now] used by Wikipedia for everything that is published on Wikipedia. And CC licenses as they are called are Creative Commons copyright licenses, I worked at Creative Commons for three years as the manager of Science and Data policy.

So my focus is more on science and the application of licensing information to scientific data and scientific software.

In this presentation I'm going to go in a slightly different but related direction.

How many people here understand what is a license?

No, no, it's easier than meaning of life. Can you tell me in very short what is a license?

Public : inaudible.

Puneet Kishor: Very good! A license is a permission. You can do something with my work or whatever that I have licensed. A license is a permission given in advance without knowing what you may do or not do. Think of a notice on a park, it says "You can come and sit here and enjoy the park", that's a license to enjoy the park. The person who's put the notice doesn't know who's going to enjoy the park, but it has been put there in the future for anyone to enjoy the park, that's a license. License is based upon some kind of underlying law. There is something that gives me the right to give you the permission, right? This is Pablo's computer, he gave me the permission to use his computer. If it was not his computer, he couldn't have given me per- well, he could have given me permission but wouldn't have meant anything, right? Because he doesn't have the right to give it to me. So in order for me to license something, I have to have the rights on it, that I can license. In the world of intellectual property, there is a right called Copyright Law. How many of you understand what is Copyright Law? Even generally.

05' Transcription cqfd93, relu CBA et JennyB

Puneet Kishor: Can you tell me what is copyright law, short?

Public : inaudible

Puneet Kishor: Someone else: Can you tell me what is copyright law?

Public : inaudible

Puneet Kishor: Try it! No?

Puneet Kishor: Copyright law is a law that gives me the first right in the benefits that I may get from things I create, OK? So if I write a poetry or if I write a song or make a film or make a Wikipedia page, I immediately get rights on it and I get the benefit or the first chance of benefiting from those. And then, based on that, I can give those rights to others and I do that using a license. If you go to any Wikipedia page or any page and if you go to the very bottom of it, terms of use, somewhere there will be written that "Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply". The person who wrote this had rights, that person then gave away those rights using this license. This license was made by Creative Commons where I used to work. OK, so that's the connection. OK. Now, Let's come back to my talk.

So you all are now experts in copyright law and you all are now experts in licenses. But there are things which are not covered by copyright law and if they are not covered by copyright law, I don’t have rights in it that I can license away, and if I can't do that then how does the world work? And that is the subject of my talk. As you can see I've gone beyond the Creative Commons basically.

Approving conventional science projects

Conventional science projects, and I'm using the word "conventional" to mean the most common place science projects that happen in universities and higher research institutions, if they involve human subjects, they have to be approved. I don't know the situation in France, but I'm hundred percent sure it probably is the same as in the United States. There is some independent body that has to approve your project to ensure that you're going to treat your human subject with respect. In the United States, these bodies are called Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) . When I want to make such a project and I want to study behavior or I want to study people and their behavior on anything, it could be a social sciences project, it could be a health project, it really doesn't matter. If humans are involved, I have to get the project approved, and the IRB which are independent bodies, they will review my project and they will ask me a lot of questions and they'll make it very difficult for me. In fact they will make sure that I'm doing everything correctly and that I am not going to do anything that will in any way harm or disrespect the humans that I'm studying.

If I am going to be getting any data from humans, I will inform them, so if I am going to be studying you, I will inform you in advance as to what I'm getting from you and you will have the option to leave the study if you want. Understood? OK. So that's a very very basic step in all science project. IRBs are like the ethical watchguards. Typically, IRBs do their review in the beginning of a project, and they review the project and then they say "yes you can do it" or "no you can't do it" or "yes you can do it but you have to make these corrections etc, etc" OK? Yeah?

09'53 Transcription cqfd93, relu CBA(+son) et relu JennyB

If I am going too fast, let me know, I mean I know when you people talk really fast in French I can't understand. I'm learning French, I understand if you speak slow, but I can understand the same thing with English.

Citizen Science

But what about … Citizen Science? Have you heard the term Citizen Science? Has anyone here heard the term Citizen Science? George you have… no? Nobody has heard the term Citizen Science besides George? George, can you tell me what is Citizen Science? You can tell in French.

Public : C'est de la science faite par des non spécialistes, par des passionnés. By passionate people, not specialists.

Puneet Kishor: Well, so there's several kinds of Citizen Science, typically Citizen Science involves, it does involve a specialist, say me, but then I employ, not employ as in payment, but I recruit a lot of common citizens who are not specialists to help me do the project.

Have you heard of a product called "Galaxy Zoo"? Galaxy Zoo is a very famous Citizen Science project. Zooniverse is the platform on which Galaxy Zoo is based.

There's a very famous project called the Cornell Birds Survey. Every year, Cornell University in the United States does this bird survey where citizens from all over the United States for a specified period go out and count birds. And it's been going on for more than a decade. It's a very rich project, yes.

Public : Inaudible

Puneet Kishor: I wouldn't call it Citizen Science although it does involve getting permission from the person whose computer on which you're running SETI@home, I wouldn't call it Citizen Science, I would just call it more like "distributed computing", you know, that's really what I'm doing here, OK.

Public : Inaudible

Puneet Kishor: Yeah, exactly, and the work can be of different kinds or quality. So I can ask you all to feel a survey, or I can ask you all to complete some task for me, or I can ask you all to report me every time that your leaving, or something like that, right. I can employ your muscles, I can employ your eyes, or I can employ your brain to help me in analyze something, etc.

So, Citizen Science is becoming very popular. It's becoming very, very popular because with the advent of the Internet and particularly with the advent of something like this [NdT:mobile phone shown], which is really a very powerful computer: I mean this is more powerful than a laptop that I add about five years ago. There's a lot of things I can do: it is a GPS, it's a camera, it is all kinds of sensors, that's a light sensor. I mean this is unbelievable, right? I mean, you know... And it's in my pocket. So this is... And everyone has one. So it's allowing people to do settling signs, distributed signs. Let have a quote, that says: "... is changing the relationship between science and society by fostering more collaborative, interdisciplinary research."

13'36 - transcrit Juu, relu son cqfd93, relu CBA et JennyB +son

How do we evaluate, approve and monitor citizen science projects

How do we approve, evaluate and monitor some citizen science projects, that's the theme of my presentation.

Three kinds of open projects

There are three kinds of projects according to a paper that I found.

Projects where citizens contribute some information, projects where they actually not just contribute some information, but they also help collaborate and help design or even analyze some information. Galaxy Zoo has a sort of that doc, you actually see some information and you tell whether it's a star or a nebula or... You know, you actually do something, you think about something and you make a judgment call. And then the various sort of the top end of Citizen Science projects would be where scientists and citizens get together and try and figure out what to study.

There is actually another fourth kind of citizen science project that's happening a lot: self-organized. How many here have heard the term quantified-self? Can you tell me what's quantified-self?

Public : inaudible

Puneet Kishor: Well, kind of. For example my phone has a motion sensor. Every time I walk it counts the number of steps I walked. And it basically allows me to keep track of how many steps I've walked and if I go here and click on a button, it'll tell me that today I've walked five thousand steps. Five thousands one hundred and five, which actually is not a lot, I should be walking twice as much more. It also tells me that I've climbed two floors, so I haven't done much climbing today.

But quantified-self is, I mean it could be anything, it could be how much you walk, it could be taking your blood pressure on a daily basis, it could be measuring your heartbeat on a daily basis, and there are people, there is a very weird place in this world, I don't know if you've heard of it, it's called San Francisco, where people are obsessed with this kind of stuff, and there are constantly measuring everything about themselves. They've got like you know, they just get stuck everywhere and they are just measuring everything, which is why I run away from there and I came to Paris, where nobody seems to be obsessed by it at all. But, that's quantified-self.

But people are taking this quantification further into analysis, and people are grouping their data together and trying to figure out what's wrong with them, trying to cure diseases, people who have certain kinds of diseases are building websites where they can collaborate and talk to each other and say "hey, you know, this is happening to me, is it happening to you also? I get headaches when I drink red wine, do you get headaches when you drink red wine also?". Things like that they are doing, right? These are sort of self-organized scientific projects that are happening.

So then these projects are happening outside conventional academies, they are not happening at the universities, they are not happening at Université Marie Curie, they are not happening at Stanford University, they are just happening at, just people, meeting together and doing these things, right? Who monitors these projects?

17'16 - transcrit Juu, relu son cqfd93, relu son CBA et JennyB

How do we approve non-conventional projects?

So, the thing that I want to ask about is, and actually I'm going to ask you a lot of question, I'm not gonna provide any answers. The thing that I'm really asking about is: how do we approve non-conventional projects?

If you decide to do a study on yourself, maybe you are taking samples out of your body, and measuring them or something. Is that ethical? Is it ethical to harm yourself? I mean the society says no. It is illegal to commit suicide. In many societies at least, in many societies. So the issue really becomes how do we evaluate and monitor projects that lie outside things that are governed by law?

Citizen science, sensors, self-measurement, participant led research, that's one of the big things that are very popular. As I mentioned people have certain diseases and they make a website where people of same disease can come together and share their experiences. You know, irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn's disease, different kinds of cancers, a lot of people want, they want somewhat comfort in a community, right? And they are sometimes giving each other advice and they are doing it outside the mechanism of medicine and health laws and the institutions.

So what is the substitute for IRBs in this question, that's something that I'm thinking about.

19'04 - transcrit Juu, relu son cqfd93, relu son CBA

On the slide What about ongoing monitoring?, six items

- Collecting data on others

- (Mis-)Reporting Data

- Damaging Irreplaceable Evidence

- Invading Privacy of Others

- Balancing Orivacy and Honesty

- Giving Credit

And what about ongoing monitoring? Even if you approve such a project, even if there is, even if you set up a system where you can approve some kind of projects that's going on, how do you monitor it on an ongoing basis? Where people are doing things like they may be collecting data on others, what if I'm collecting data on you and misreport it? I tell something bad about you or I tell something good about myself that doesn't exist. You know, what if I recruit all of you to measure water samples from your village wells, and you find that it's not very good, and you decide not to report it, right? So these are the issues. Or you find that somebody else's well is not very good, and that person hasn't reported. Should you tell on that person, that person hasn't reported, you know, because then there's the issue of privacy that comes in.

So invading privacy of others, if there's a citizen science project let's say, let's say I recruited all of you because I'm studying nesting habits of certain kinds of birds; And you all are bird lovers and I've recruited all of you, and you are supposed to go to the nests of the birds and take photographs and bring them back to me. Turns out that you're also a collector of eggs, and you steal the eggs, right? That's the issue so harming existing data or harming natural environment or culture property, these are the issues when there is no mechanism for ongoing monitoring that might exist in a more conventional academy.

20'49 transcrit par Cpm, relu son cqfd93, relu son CBA et JennyB

Legal tools are…

So the reality is that legal tools that exist such as copyright law, etc, are inadequate, they either don't exist, and if they exist, they are inadequate, they are inappropriate, they are expensive, nobody likes lawyers, lawyers are expensive and they are confusing, and they really scare us. I mean you know, how many of you have ever been to a court? No one. And a lot of people will never go to a court in their normal lives. I mean a normal life, doesn't involve lawyers. And it doesn't involve courts and yet our life is ruled by laws. Right? So, it's an interesting thing that we have all these laws and yet laws don't really, you know, come in to play in our life on a daily basis.

On the slide Legal tools are…, five items

- Inadequate

- Inappropriate

- Expensive

- Complicated

- Fear-Driven

Sur l'écran "Le recours aux outils de la Loi sont…" cinq points :

- Inadéquation

- Inapproprié

- Cher (coûteux)

- Compliqué

- Guidé par/génère de la peur

21'41 transcrit par Cpm, relu son CBA

Slide 14/10 Do no evil

So, one solution could be do no evil. You eared that one, right? Do you know evil? That hasn't gone very well. There is a big company that has this, think all do no evil. And they have done even evil up there. So, maybe, the thing that I, I'm thinking quite a bit about, is about just mutual respect and social contract. So how many of you have eared the term social contract? "Contrat social", here we go, french, yeah, Rousseau, yeah. So this is notion that we give up something to get something. Right? We, individuals, when we become member of a society or a country, we give up some of our individual freedoms, in return for the safety and other things that the society provide. That's the social contract, right? I'll be a citizen of France and France will look after me, that kind of a thing. Somebody laugh.

Public: Yes because maybe too much.

Puneet Kishor: Yeah. But anyway, that's the notion of social contract. This notion that there is something that bind all of the groups together.

23'03 - transcrit Juu, relu son cqfd93, relu son CBA

Good behaviour by another name

So, here are different names for good behavior. You know, a lot of conferences nowadays have this thing called "code of conduct". And of course social contract, doctors have this thing called Hippocratic oath, you know the little Rx, you know "I'll never harm anyone, bla bla bla etc", we have something called "honor code university", I don't know if you have that here? In the United States there's a honor code that you will not cheat, like we can get exams where you take the exam to your home, and you bring it back two or three days later but it's a honor code that you will not ask someone else, you know. Mutual respect… So what I'm saying is interestingly there are things they may not always work, but there are things out there which are not based in law. And they are designed to make communities work, OK? So can something like this be used or maybe a combination of these things be used?

24'16 - transcrit Juu, relu son CBA

Importance of data integrity

One issue that becomes very important that I'm really interested in is the notion of data integrity.

This thing [holding his phone] is telling me that I walked five thousand one hundred and five steps today. What if it's over-reporting? What if it's under-reporting? I don't know. Should I just believe it? We go to live believing a lot of things, not questioning them, right? Until we get some other evidence to the contrary.

There is a lot of focus in this conference and in my life, I work at creative cons as I said, on open license, right? First of all I guarantee you ninety percent of the people don't know what an open license means when they say "open license". OK, fair enough. Like people don't know what organic means, but they shop organic food, right?

Open is good, but is not a substitute for good science, 'cause in the end science is asking certain questions, and that is more important than anything. What would you rather? Open but crappy science, closed but good science? If you're a scientist you would probably choose good science, because a scientist is motivated by answering questions. By finding insights of something.

So the question, and this is particularly useful not so much in software, but in hardware. Open hardware. What if the design is open but the data coming out of the hardware are bad? So let's say I make a hardware, I made some fantastic sensor, you know like the Star Wars tricorder it can measure everything, and I publish it under an open license, right? And you come in, you see that, you like it, you take it down, you're a great guy, we are not very honest. You take my open design and you make some changes to it, or you maybe cut some corners and make something which has license opened but now is not producing right data. And what if this thing was measuring something that was important for environmental health or public health, maybe reporting on air quality, maybe reporting on water quality? there could be serious consequences for public health.

So the issue of data integrity is very important which has nothing to do with licensing, but it's very important for open science and the quality of science.

26'55 - transcrit Juu, relu son CBA

Evaluating data integrity

So, there is a study that I found where they found many ways in which you can actually evaluate data integrity.

By the way, all my ??? talk is on my website and, no software's required, just a browser, just click you know, it's a program I wrote and so it's available to anyone. So you can see all the links are there.

So you can measure different... Think of these like vectors along which you can measure data integrity. Is the data accessible, believable, complete, consistent, relevant, secure, etc. There is many things you can measure, you can add more to this or subtract from this. They are dimensions that you can measure.

Building can do as look a reputation, or think of it like social capital. This is very common on web communities, right? How many likes for example, or how many re-tweets, this is one example of some kind of trust and something. We have reputation scores in communities that are software, particularly software communities well you know, there is someone who's answered a lot of questions. Has people used Stackoverflow? Stackoverflow has the reputation, all has this reputation system basically, and as your reputation grows more you can do more things, etc. So that's sort like trust across social networks, and what I call co-calibration where you can take yourself and calibrate yourself against someone else, or take a piece of hardware and calibrate a against a non-truth, maybe a reference hardware. So, that's another way for evaluating data integrity.

The bottom line is that there are mechanisms out there for making our lives run in a community fashion, without involving law. What are some of those mechanisms that can be taken together or combined into something that can be used to evaluate and monitor open science projects. And this is the thing that I actually find the most interesting right now and sort of my post-license world of work.

29'37 - transcrit Juu

That's all the talk I have. I think I have a lot of time left, right? So, I really want people to speak up and give their thoughts and, you know, that's not be a one-way thing. feel free to speak in English, I won't feel offended at all, or speak in esperanto, I don't care, Georges will translate it.

Please I really want to hear your thoughts, don't be shy, I mean there is nothing wrong, I don't know enough about this remember, I want the questions, I want answers. And I don't think we will all gonna get answers here. So if you have something, tell me.... Come on, you're french, you have an opinion on everything!

Public: I'm sorry for my English which is very poor, I just have a question about, when you said that people which are ill can share about their illness and they try to share their illness, have you got some example of sharing medicines, how can it be possible with the pharmaceutical industry?

Puneet Kishor: You mean actually sharing actual medicines? Actual tablets?

Public: Or advices, everything, you know...

Puneet Kishor: There are a lot of communities on the internet, very very simple searches will find, there is one called "Crohnology" (https://crohnology.com/) which is for a disease called Crohn's disease, there is a website called "PatientsLikeMe" (https://www.patientslikeme.com/), which actually allows you to find other people who may have same common illness, see what happens is, if I have an illness that's very difficult to treat, then I'm looking for answers. And maybe my doctor can't give me all the answers, so I look for other people with similar illness, right? And internet allows me now to meet people of similar interests, or similar goals right? So we can share information, so there are good things in here, it gives me solice, I mean it gives me like comfort knowing that somebody else has similar things and can maybe give me some words of wisdom or some advice.

There is a danger also, and the danger is that we could be giving each other wrong advice, right? And this is where the medical profession is kind of ??, should people be out there be dispensing advice to each other, or giving each other, god forbid, give some medicines actually, without advice you know, "you have to drink hot water with something, because it works I swear it works!", right? And people do that, and you find that the correct thing is not being treated, so there is danger also in it.

Some of these groups have actually become very active, and have become very effective, they're very good, I think. I don't know the answer, I am torn between this notion of people know what is best for them, and then every day I see stupid things, people doing stupid things and I wonder they don't know what is best for them, you know. I don't know the answer to that, I thing there has to be some balance.

You heard of 23andMe (https://www.23andme.com)? It is a company in San Francisco and you give them 99 dollars and they will mail you a little kit and you rub some saliva on it, you mail it back to them and they will decode your DNA, and make it accessible to you over the Web. 99 bucks, what a deal! Sometimes they have a two-for-one, you and your friend, only for one price. The problem was, that they were initially claiming that "we will show you your DNA, and you can then find out problems about potentially diseases", so maybe you look at that on the you realize "Oh my god, I have something which makes me in 9O% likely to get breast cancer"

Public: They assume, that you can read your DNA. I can that with my DNA, I will understand something.

Puneet Kishor: Well, they claimed they'll make it easy to understand. But the problem was that that was like giving diagnostic advice, and it hasn't been like that, because there are rules about, because then it becomes a medical device that you're selling, and you're diagnosing something. So there is one thing to do something which is educational or entertainment or whatever, another thing saying it's medicine, because it's governed by certain laws. Well there is things people fell on both sides, some people say they want to know, do you have a right to know everything about yourself? I mean that's a big question, right?

35'35 - transcrit Juu

Public: Thank you for the talk. For me, there is something to do with Wikipedia structure, we need at least three levels of comprehension for everybody, for engineering specialists and for scientists which have a tool to understand very high level of the insides, not everybody has the education to understand, you have this responsibility to make all answers as we can the complexity understandable for everybody, and this is an obligation I think for openness to make as well as we can the complexity...

Puneet Kishor: On Wikipedia?

Public: Wikipedia is a good example...

Puneet Kishor: I've no argument to that, I think it's a very good goal to have, I don't know who's gonna have to do that, it's expensive to explain things, it takes a lot of time to... Simple things are hard, to make something simple is very, very hard, and a lot of people are getting paid a lot of money to make things simple, so I don't know who's gonna do it but I agree with you, I've no problem with that.

37'45 - transcrit Juu

Puneet Kishor: Come on... Nothing? I'm sorry I have more questions than answers, but this is a topic that...

Public: Do you know if the current review boards in the United States and France are actually considering this question and thinking about how to involve this kind of citizen science?

Puneet Kishor: As far as I know, no. Well I don't know anything about France at all, but definitely in the US no. Citizen science is popular, but it's not still mainstream that has entered the realm of review boards. If a project is constructed in a way that is a conventional project, maybe I’m a scientist in the university, and I’m going to involve a lot of citizens in there, then I'll probably have to go to an institution review board, and it will judge my project, but not because it's citizen science necessarily, but more because it happens to be a scientific project that involves human beings. There are certainly not thinking about, as far as I know, about ongoing monitoring of projects and how the behaviour of citizens amongst themselves and on other citizens, how would that be impacted. As far as I know, no, and this is very new. And this notion, there is an increased conversation about this notion of social contract, that we have some responsibility, toward each other, and also the researcher has a responsibility toward the person being studied, and vice-versa, like for example if I go to a hospital, and I'm going to be treated for say, high blood pressure, hypertension or something, do I have an obligation to make my information available for the benefit of others? Because I am benefiting from the knowledge of others. So that conversation about social contracts has started but it's very, very much in the beginning. Nobody as far as I know knows anything about what such a contract would look like.

40'30 - transcrit Juu

Public : J'essaie en anglais ou quelqu'un peut traduire ? En fait, c'est une question, peut-être, qui fâche. De quoi vous vivez ? Qui vous paie ? et est-ce que c'est le gouvernement américain is helping association like Creative Commons, and who pays you to do this? Because from my eyes you're the incarnation of general interest and as a French citizen I’m asking myself which organization, and I hope you will answer me American government is paying you?

Puneet Kishor: As far as I know, no

Public : No, sure?

Puneet Kishor: American government is not paying me.

Public : Or federal government? Californian, you're from San Francisco...

Puneet Kishor: OK, I used to work at Creative Commons, I don't work at Creative Commons now, so not only is Creative Commons not paying me, not only is American government not paying, actually no one is paying me because I'm jobless, I'm actually looking for a job. I'm jobless and homeless.

So the second question I think you eluded that American government was paying Creative Commons, no American government is not paying Creative Commons. Creative Commons is a non profit organization founded by foundations, philanthropic foundations, American government has no hand in anything. American government does fund science projects like any countries government fund science projects in that country, higher than such projects you know there are organizations like National Health, National science foundation, and they give grants to universities, and universities give them to scientists who their projects, so in the end I guess the money comes from American government, American government gets money from me, because I'm a tax payer, unless you are in Greece or somewhere, most people pay taxes. And when you pay taxes, that's what the government gets. I understand in France you pay a lot of taxes, right, and in return you get a lot of things. So that's really what happens. Did I answer your question?

Public: Yes.

Puneet Kishor: OK. Just to be clear, I don't work for anyone, I'm independent contractor working for myself. I’ve no boss, which is a very good thing.

Georges: Still a few minutes left, so if somebody has another question?

Puneet Kishor: Anything else? Ask me anything.

43'49 - transcrit Juu

Public: So we're working for a software which is developed by people in Europe ?? and so on, on mailing list we had some discussions that are a bit too flamatory if I can say, so we have a big discussion about code of conduct, we hit difference of culture in states in Europe, the thing is, would you say that code of conduct is a law or not?

Puneet Kishor: No, certainly not.

Public: Because many people reacted to , thinking, of course it is not an official law imposed, it was the community organising itself and, but for many people reacted, in particular people from Europe reacted to this, or a group of people, as a group is trying to impose a law, and if it's a code of conduct it’s a law, and if it's a law there should be distinctions, punishments if people...

Puneet Kishor: No, I would say it's not a law, it is something agreed upon by a group, let's say you invite me to your house for diner, you invite all of us to your house for diner tonight, and when we come in there you say that we have to take our shoes off before entering. And I decide to not take my shoes off, you can throw me out of your house. Is that a law? No. it's just a code of conduct you've established, right? ?? like that, no there could be cultural differences, maybe in my culture it is against my honour to take off my shoes. How dare you say I should take off my shoes? Well then it becomes a problem, right? So that's always there, so no I don't think code of conduct is law, and ?? it’s a really good thing because if you can come to a conclusion, then you manage to create something without involving law. And that's the thing we're trying to get at, because lawyers are expensive and confusion etcetera. In the end of course if a legal rule is broken, the law would come in, right? I mean if I come into your house and take off my shoes and come in and everything than I steal you're cutlery something like that, then I've broken law, I committed a crime and you can report me. It may not be worth it, if I've just stolen a fork, but I've broken a law. But I personally don't think code of conduct is law, I do understand the difficulty a code of conduct cross-cultural situation because definitely the major differences between America and Europe in terms of cultural expectations.

46'55 - transcrit Juu

'Public: So what do you think about strict chairman.

Puneet Kishor: Strict chairman? Very, very important. Out of time! Thank you!