Code of Conduct

The IA Institute is discussing a Code of Conduct for members of the Board of Directors. Board member, Jeff Parks, suggested basing the document on Google's corporate Code of Conduct, which begins with the mantra, "Don't Be Evil."

From the IA Institute Minutes blog:

* Code of Conduct

In order to show our desire to keep the Board of Directors accountable to the highest possible ethical and professional standard, it was agreed that Jeff will work on re-shaping the Code of Conduct he took from Google’s to reflect specifically the needs of the IAI.

This is a great idea and calls to mind some previous discussions about professional codes of conduct for UX practitioners. (See Lou Rosenfeld's Bloug post, "Shame and Disgust," on working for the Veterans' Administration.) Shouldn't we, as practitioners, not just board members, of information architecture, also hold ourselves to a higher standard of ethics for serving the goals of the users?

Here are some resources from the UPA code of conduct and other initiatives around ethics:

Code of Conduct:
http://www.upassoc.org/about_upa/leadership/code_of_conduct.html

Designing Voting Systems:
http://www.upassoc.org/civiclife/voting/ethics.html