History of the OEC
Seed money from Raymond Stata, President of Analog Devices, funded the prototype for the OEC in the early 1990s. Several grants from the National Science Foundation (SBR-9511862, SBR-9871169, SES-9976500, SES-0135585, and SES-0428597) supported its development and operation until its transfer to the NAE. Harry E. Bovay, Jr., President of MidSouth Telecommunications Company, contributed funds for transition and continuing support.
Students, first at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and, from 1997-2007, at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) are the primary creators of the OEC pages. They have made many invaluable contributions to its design, maintenance, and accessibility. Furthermore, thanks to Andrew Penry, Andrew Roksandic, Toni Thayer, and Laura Simna, the new NAE OEC will have a capacity for distributed content creation (content creation at many campuses). Conceptually, the Online Ethics Center exists just as much in Europe as it does in America. Cyberspace allows users to transcend space and time.
The students who first staffed the OEC assisted Caroline Whitbeck in her work under an NSF grant to the Engineering Coalition of Schools for Excellence in Education and Leadership (ECSEL) and created the first of the ECSEL pages that now form the Diversity Section in the Workplace sections of the OEC. Heidi Ashih led that student team, which included Marlon Buchanan, Jagruti Patel, Juliet Midgley and Xiaobo Li. Marlon Buchanan was the Center's first Web master.
The OEC moved to Case Western Reserve University in 1997, with Caroline Whitbeck, when she became the first Elmer G. Beamer-Hubert H. Schneider Professor in Ethics. There Anila Jahangiri headed the student team. Michael Melamed made many technical and content contributions to the site, as did Jonathan Wehner, after him. Francy Acosta also headed the team for a while, and created and maintained the Spanish language pages.
Later, Amanda Shaffer and then Toni Thayer provided able staff support as Site Manager and Site Editor. Andrew Penry, first as an undergraduate and then as a Web consultant, researched accessibility issues for the website and oversaw its transformation into a W3C/WAI accessible site. Subsequently, he created a sophisticated Linux-based database content management system for the OEC . (This system has been converted to run on Windows system software used by the NAE.) Andrew Roksandic has handled all other technical issues since fall 2002, and made major contributions to the operations of the OEC. Laura Simna managed the student team during Toni Thayer's leave and contributed immeasurably to the smooth running of the OEC. Renee Holland provided able administrative assistance to the OEC from 1999 to 2007.
In 1999, CWRU hosted a conference on engineering ethics. The papers resulting from that conference can be found here.
The OEC has had a distinguished group of advisors since its inception. They have come from a variety of disciplines in addition to engineering and science, including philosophy, psychology, history, and sociology, and include individuals with oversight responsibilities for ethical behavior for professional societies, corporations, and government agencies, as well as academics. You can see the roster of advisors and their biographies here.
The Center is updated continuously, so the project team is happy to have your comments and suggestions whenever you care to make them. You can send your remarks to Rachelle Hollander at rhollander@nae.edu.