Exploring (un)sustainable growth of digital technologies in the home

HCI and Ubicomp research often centres around the support of humans interacting with digital technology. Despite this obvious focus, there seems to be less work on understanding how these digital technologies can lead to growth in use, dependence, and influence practices in everyday life. In this paper we discuss how digital technologies have been, and continue to be, adopted in domestic practices—and how the growth of interactions with various ecologies of digital technologies can lead to growth in use and energy consumption. We further the discussion within ICT4S and sustainable HCI on how to promote research that encourages sustainability as a core concern—socially, economically, and ecologically—emphasising that defining limits to growth are important when trying to affect change in sustainable directions. We echo calls for more significant sustainability research from HCI, and set out some avenues of design for moving in this direction

Sustaining Community Access to Technology: Who Should Pay and Why.

Based on their research on several national, regional, local projects, and an analysis of the Canadian federal governments main Internet public access programs, the authors argue that as the digital divide has evolved and changed, changes in a conception of this and approaches to sustainability are required. This requires defining sustainability in terms of supporting community organizations that provide social development and related content and services to the public, with support for core services, content development as well as technical access and networking. The authors further argue that governments, and in particular the federal government, has the primary role for providing sustainability funding at the community level to address the digital divide and development goals. A conceptual approach is required that extends our understanding of the problem of the digital divide and sustainability to the everyday lived circumstances and needs of citizens and their local communities. Such an approach also permits us to consider sustainability in terms of being primarily a role for governments to provide funding to the community service organizations that provide services at the community level in order to address inequalities and under development. Funding should be used for technical services, the development and maintenance of core operations (staff, volunteers, overheads) and content services that can be accessed using communication technologies

Perspectives on Digital Sustainability

This habilitation thesis presents perspectives on digital sustainability, a novel concept connecting digitalization with sustainability. It explains why digital artifacts such as software or data have to meet technical characteristics of quality, transparency, semantics and multiple locations in order to serve society in the long term. However, these requirements are just necessary but not sufficient preconditions to consider digital artifacts sustainable. Their associated ecosystem of businesses, governments, and individuals must also meet the legal and organizational characteristics of open license, shared tacit knowledge, participation, good governance, and diversified funding. And, finally, sustainable digital artifacts must lead to ecological, societal and economical benefits. This thesis statement is discussed in the introductory chapter of the habilitation. It connects and summarizes 13 refereed publications clustered in five perspectives on digital sustainability: In the first perspective, the path of defining the concept of digital sustainability is summarized. This part starts with a publication that introduced an initial set of characteristics for digital sustainability (Stuermer, 2014). The following article connects digital sustainability with digital preservation (Stuermer and Abu-Tayeh, 2016). These studies have eventually led to an extended publication in a sustainability journal elaborating the basic conditions of digital sustainability in detail (Stuermer et al., 2017a). The second perspective includes recent publications on open source software (OSS) research scrutinizing how patterns of digital sustainability are applied within the software development industry. One publication analyzes feature requests within the Eclipse OSS community (Heppler et al., 2016). The following article develops a maturity model of Inner Source, a special form of OSS development practices in an organization (Eckert et al., 2017). And one study in a computer science journal addresses different types of OSS governance by comparing independent and joint communities (Eckert et al., 2019). The next perspective focuses on the procurement of information technology (IT) which involves critical topics of knowledge management and governance related to digital sustainability. Analyzing data crawled from the Swiss public procurement platform Simap.ch exposes lock-in effects, outsourcing decisions as well as multisourcing within the software industry. One article in this perspective introduces the methodology and the dataset pointing out the high level of direct awards within the IT sector (Stuermer et al., 2017b). Another publication tests hypotheses on contract choice in regard to knowledge specificity and task scope (Krancher and Stuermer, 2018a). And one study explains multisourcing decisions using a large dataset on public procurement of IT in Switzerland (Krancher and Stuermer, 2018b). The subsequent perspective highlights open data and linked data as another form of sustainable digital artifacts. One publication proposes a framework permitting the measurement of the impact of open data (Stuermer and Dapp, 2016). Another article introduces linked open government data (LOGD), a kind of graph-structured open data stored in different kinds of platforms (Hitz-Gamper et al., 2019). The final perspective extends the phenomenon of open data into the area of governmental services. By linking the concepts of public governance and open government one article shows how transparency and participation are achieved with digital tools (Stuermer and Ritz, 2014). Another publication includes an empirical analysis of the FixMyStreet open government platform in Zurich called “Züri wie neu” using open data and a user survey to identify the motivation of citizens using this digital tool (Abu-Tayeh et al., 2018)

Teaching geography for a sustainable world: a case study of a secondary school in Spain

Geography has a major responsibility in delivering education for sustainable development (ESD), especially because the geographical concepts of place and space are key dimensions for the analysis and pursuit of sustainability. This paper presents the results of a research that investigated how the teaching of geography in secondary education in Catalonia (Spain) contributes to ESD. For the development of this research it was explored what is involved in understanding and resolving issues about sustainable development and how geography teachers might best conceptualize and teach in this new domain. As a result of this theoretical reflection it has been defined a proposal or model for reorienting the geography curriculum from the basis of the ESD paradigm, which is based and structured in four groups of criteria and recommendations as follows: recommendations for defining competences and learning objectives; criteria for selecting geographical contents and themes; criteria for selecting geographical areas and for the use of scale; and finally, recommendations for choosing the most suitable teaching and learning approach

A holistic power systems asset engineering and decision management framework for railway asset managers.

Defining, designing and implementing an asset management system capable of effectively managing assets throughout their life in terms of engineering, financial, digital and stakeholder needs is challenging. Furthermore, governance frameworks of the past have traditionally resulted in 'silo' type asset interventions without considering the total sustainability of system outcomes. In this paper the writers set out a governance framework definition suitable for managing the complex adaptive needs of engineering, financial, digital and stakeholder requirements. In addition, it will set out the components of a framework that can manage complex assemblage of assets by using bottom up aggregation of 'asset realities' and the 'business' or outcomes needs based on stakeholder, socio-economic, technical and or business strategy requirements

Eco‐Holonic 4.0 Circular Business Model to Conceptualize Sustainable Value Chain Towards Digital Transition

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize a circular business model based on an Eco-Holonic Architecture, through the integration of circular economy and holonic principles. A conceptual model is developed to manage the complexity of integrating circular economy principles, digital transformation, and tools and frameworks for sustainability into business models. The proposed architecture is multilevel and multiscale in order to achieve the instantiation of the sustainable value chain in any territory. The architecture promotes the incorporation of circular economy and holonic principles into new circular business models. This integrated perspective of business model can support the design and upgrade of the manufacturing companies in their respective industrial sectors. The conceptual model proposed is based on activity theory that considers the interactions between technical and social systems and allows the mitigation of the metabolic rift that exists between natural and social metabolism. This study contributes to the existing literature on circular economy, circular business models and activity theory by considering holonic paradigm concerns, which have not been explored yet. This research also offers a unique holonic architecture of circular business model by considering different levels, relationships, dynamism and contextualization (territory) aspects

blobs, wiggles, folds and distortions

The borderland existing in contemporary digital technology is the unexplored terrain. Representing the same manifest destiny of the newly discovered American continent, the self-sustainability of westward expansion and monetary potential of the 1980's world of high finance has each been usurped by the current opportunities of the digital realm. The new landscape breeds promise and possibility represented by the edge condition and the outlaw: the individual that employs the lack of orderly cultural domination to re-evaluate their moral boundaries by defining their own way of living. The train-robbing bandits have redefined the six-shooter as John Draper discovered that a Cap'n Crunchâ„¢ whistle produces a tone activating AT&T's free calling in 1971 birthed the hacker

International data curation education action (IDEA) working group: a report from the second workshop of IDEA

The second workshop of the International Data curation Education (IDEA) Working Group was held December 5, 2008, in Edinburgh, Scotland, following the 4th International Digital Curation Conference. This workshop was jointly organized by the UK's Digital Curation Centre (DCC), the US's Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (SILS). Nearly forty educators and researchers accepted invitations to attend, with representation from universities, research centers, and funding agencies from Canada, the US, the UK, and Germany

Software Sustainability: The Modern Tower of Babel

<p>The aim of this paper is to explore the emerging definitions of software sustainability from the field of software engineering in order to contribute to the question, what is software sustainability?</p

Modeling nature-based and cultural recreation preferences in mediterranean regions as opportunities for smart tourism and diversification

The tourism and recreational o er of Mediterranean destinations involves, essentially, the promotion of mass tourism, based on the appeal of the sun and beach, and the quality of its coastal assets. Alongside the impacts of climate change, poor tourism diversification represents a threat to the resilience of the territory. Thus, heterogenization of noncoastal tourism products presents an opportunity to strengthen regional resilience to present and future challenges, hence the need to study, comparatively, the complementary preferences of tourists and residents of these regions in order to unveil their willingness to diversify their recreational experience, not only in coastal spaces, but also—and especially—in interior territories with low urban density. Consequently, this strategic option may represent a way of strengthening resilience and sustainability through diversification. In this context, a survey was conducted among 400 beach tourists and 400 residents of a case study—namely, three municipalities of the Algarve region in southern Portugal—in order to analyze their degree of preference for activities besides the sun and beach, such as nature-based and cultural tourism activities, and to probe the enhancement potential of each tourism and recreational activity through the various landscape units considered by experts, stakeholders, and tour operators. The respective degree of preference and enhancement potential were indexed to the area of each landscape unit. Subsequently, respecting the existing recreational structure and constraints, a suitability map for territory enhancement and the implementation of smart tourism practices for each tourism activity and landscape unit is presented. Results show a significant preference for noncoastal outdoor recreational activities.FCT- Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia: SFRH/BD/102328/2014; PTDC/GES-URB/31928/2017info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio