The Digital Ethics Forum (DEF) is an annual event promoted by the Association Sloweb www.sloweb.org , founded in 2017, for professors and students, professionals, workers, citizens aimed at promoting ethical use of the web, reaching its sixth edition in 2024, in presence and/or online.
The DEF is dedicated to dissemination concerning issues of ethics in the production, distribution and use of digital technologies and information technology. The approach looks at the values and social models generated by technologies rather than following the evolution of the technologies themselves in detail.
In the field of artificial intelligence, for example, the DEF disseminates studies on the impact on production, on the consequences of the disorderly introduction of mass products on the social and economic models that are ultimately proposed or re-proposed by the digital industry and the states that support it. The cut of the interventions is therefore informative and educational; it seeks to limit the intellectual debate, favoring instead the dissemination of information and knowledge.
Since 2020 the event is also online, and since 2022 in a hybrid form – online and in person, with interventions by educators and psychologists, philosophers and computer scientists: we believe that only complementary skills in an open environment allow us to identify concrete initiatives, which are needed for responsible use by industry, and conscious use by citizens.
The most interesting interventions of the Digital Ethics Forum are collected periodically, to make books.
The Manual for a Conscious Use of the Web, Golem Editore, is available in bookstores. The following can be found at Loescher or online: Manual of Computer Science and Elements of Digital Ethics
Just released (October 2024): Sloweb Conversations for a sustainable digital, Guerini Next Editore.
Sloweb is a non-profit association founded to promote the responsible use of IT tools, the web and Internet applications through information, education and the fight against improper use by organizations of all kinds.
Sloweb is committed to protecting fundamental rights also in the specific area of ecological management of people’s digital data: reducing, protecting, selecting, owning, deleting and managing one’s digital inheritance.
The above is essential to make the web safer, freer and more useful for everyone.
Go to the Sloweb website
The recordings of the last five editions of the Digital Ethics Forum are available on the Sloweb association YouTube channel.
If you are interested in learning more about some of the topics covered in recent years, we have divided the recordings into short clips, so you can listen to and watch the individual interventions.
See all videos