個案資料

In January 2022, Stephanie Owens, the administrative leader at StateU, an LGBTQ+-welcoming university in the United States, participated in a kick-off meeting for the pronoun project as the project lead. The goal of the project was to develop a centralized system for collecting and disseminating the personal pronouns of StateU’s students, staff, and faculty. The university embarked on the pronoun project to foster a community that recognized and celebrated the self-authorship of individual identities. It also saw personal pronoun data as useful to directing funding to initiatives that fostered justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. These goals were important for Owens, who had always been a champion of student success and an advocate for historically marginalized student communities.<br><br>At a pivotal moment after the kick-off meeting, tensions emerged around possible technical solutions: while members of the technical team supported a more efficient, secure, and reliable solution that would include a drop-down list of pronouns, the stakeholders on the team—many of whom worked directly with LGBTQ+ students, staff, and faculty and had lived experiences that had exposed them to the potentially harmful effects of predefining pronouns in a drop-down list—were strongly in favour of using a free-form text field for pronouns. Faced with escalating conflict, Owens asked both teams to prepare outlines of the advantages and disadvantages of their solutions and any other potential solutions. Owens was reviewing these materials as the next meeting approached. She had to weigh all arguments and decide for herself first: should StateU implement the drop-down list, the free-form text field, or the validation table solution?

The case is primarily designed for a graduate or final-year undergraduate course on data governance focusing on data privacy, security, and ethics. It assumes that students have intermediate-level knowledge of management information systems, relational database systems, and information systems development (i.e., that they can define a relational database and key concepts and are familiar with systems analysis and design approaches). After working with this case, students will be able to do the following:<br><br><ul><li>Analyze challenges, risks, and concerns related to collecting, processing, and using personal data.</li><li>Consider technological, privacy and security, and ethical factors related to modifying or developing information systems in response to EDI and social justice initiatives.</li><li>Evaluate information systems projects along the dimensions of responsible innovation and suggest ways to increase responsible innovation in projects.</li><li>Recognize the positive and negative impacts of collecting expanded data about vulnerable or marginalized populations.</li></ul>

• data justice
• gender
• LGBTQ+
• responsible innovation
• personal data