Loren Terveen

A longish response: I think perhaps the key point here is that faculty at a university are in many ways "their own bosses". Faculty don't ask their department heads (or senior colleagues) for 'permission' to do any research...

and typically most people in any department are unaware of the details of what their colleagues are doing. In the US, the right way to vet the ethics of ones' research is through your University's IRB. Again, one's dept. head and colleagues are not involved in this process at all

I would argue that the IRB, as a legal requirement, should be considered a minimum rather than a gold standard by the people in the broader research community who judge the work. By that I mean program committees, not colleagues.

This is an important point. This has been the topic of intense discussion in the ACM SIGCHI community for a number of years. Should PCs 'override' standard ethical reviews? Under what circumstances? There are strong opinions on this! @asbruckman might have thoughts...

The key challenge for program committees is that standards for human subjects regulation vary by country. It's unreasonable to apply the US standard to everyone. 1/

There are some countries whose human subjects regulatory frameworks are inadequate/non-existent. Researchers from those countries won't have undergone IRB review because in many places are no IRBs or anything like it. 2/

So a question as simple as "did this undergo IRB review?" is fraught with western imperialism.... No, there's no IRB where that researcher is from. Now what? 3/

One possible solution is to create an *ACM standard* and say researchers hoping to publish in ACM venues must abide by the ACM standard (and all their local rules as well). The problem is, writing and maintaining such a standard is a huuuuge undertaking. 4/