The internet and sustainable development

The past thirty years have seen tremendous growth in the capabilities and reach of information and communication technologies (ICTs). The Internet, especially, has become a critical enabler of social and economic change, transforming how government, business and citizens interact and offering new ways of addressing development challenges. A new approach to development will be agreed this year, when the United Nations adopts a Post-2015 Development Agenda based around Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Internet Society is convinced that the Internet is a unique platform for innovation, creativity, economic opportunity and social inclusion, which can make a major contribution to achieving these. This briefing describes the Internet’s potential and identifies priorities for action. The Internet will be a powerful enabler for the Sustainable Development Goals which will be adopted in September 2015. Its impact will be felt in all development sectors, from health and education, through agriculture and innovation, to security and the environment. It will increase as the capabilities and reach of Internet networks and services continue to grow rapidly while the Post-2015 Development Agenda is implemented between 2015 and 2030. More attention must be paid to the relationship between the Internet and sustainable development to ensure that potential gains are maximized. All stakeholders share responsibility to work together to develop policies, services, tools and applications that will bring the benefits of Internet access and use to everyone, improving access to health and education, spreading information and knowledge, enabling innovation and enterprise, and thereby promoting economic growth, social inclusion and environmental sustainability. The Internet Society is ready to play its full part in fulfilling that sustainable development agenda

Connected seeds and sensors: co-designing internet of things for sustainable smart cities with urban food-growing communities.

We present a case study of a participatory design project in the space of sustainable smart cities and Internet of Things. We describe our design process that led to the development of an interactive seed library that tells the stories of culturally diverse urban food growers, and networked environmental sensors from their gardens, as a way to support more sustainable food practices in the city. This paper contributes to an emerging body of empirical work within participatory design that seeks to involve citizens in the design of smart cities and Internet of Things, particularly in the context of marginalised and culturally diverse urban communities. It also contributes empirical work towards non-utilitarian approaches to sustainable smart cities through a discussion of designing for urban diversity and slowness

Sustainable Development Data Availability on the Internet

Defining what Sustainability and Sustainable Development mean is a critical task, as they are global objectives, which cover different aspects of life often difficult to quantify and describe. Talking about sustainable development means dealing with the development and implementation of SD strategies at international as well as at local level. With this regard, SD information plays a key role in monitoring SD performances at different administration levels. The aim of this paper is to give an overview of sustainable data availability on the internet at international, European, national and regional level. The paper is novel in the fact that the attention of the whole analysis focused on internet, considered as the principal mean for accessing data. In fact, the web has become through the years a fundamental tool for exchanging information amongst people, organisations, institutes, governments, thanks to its easy accessibility for a wide knowledge exchange. Sustainable development data collected at different administrative levels are classified and processed according to different methods and procedures; they are gathered at different scales, in different periods and they have a different frequency of updating. Data accuracy and meta-information on available data considerably vary, too. Few organisations at the international and at the European level such as, for example, World Bank, United Nations, OECD, FAO, Eurostat, EEA committed themselves to process information belonging to different sources aiming at standardising and producing comparable data sets for several nations and regions. Following the above considerations, various international, European and national organisations’ databases were investigated in order to check the availability of data at different administrative levels, mostly focusing on those sectors considered as pillars for the definition and monitoring of the implementation of the EU Sustainable Development Strategy, as pointed out in the Communication of the EC SEC(2005) 161 final.Sustainability, Indicators, Regional Development, Internet, Database

The internet revolution: opportunities for tourism and forestry

This paper highlights the potential of the Internet for forestry and tourism, with special emphasis on ecotourism. The paper discusses some of the issues involved in developing forestry and ecotourism information resources on the Internet. The justification which underpins the paper (especially in its discussion of ecotourism) is that sustainable management of New Zealand’s biological resources, including its forests, entails their use for tourism purposes; but that such tourism must be ecologically sensitive and responsible

Collaboration Enabling Internet Resource Collection-Building Software and Technologies

Over the last decade the Library of the University of California, Riverside and its collaborators have developed a number of systems, service designs, and projects that utilize innovative technologies to foster better Internet finding tools in libraries and more cooperative and efficient effort in Internet link and metadata collection building. The open-source software and projects discussed represent appropriate technologies and sustainable strategies that we believe will help Internet portals, digital libraries, virtual libraries, library catalogs-with-portal-like-capabilities (IPDVLCs), and related collection-building efforts in academia to better scale and more accurately anticipate and meet the needs of scholarly and educational users.published or submitted for publicatio

eHealth and the Internet of Things

To respond to an ageing population, eHealth strategies offer significant opportunities in achieving a balanced and sustainable healthcare infrastructure. Advances in technology both at the sensor and device levels and in respect of information technology have opened up other possibilities and options. Of significance among these is what is increasingly referred to as the Internet of Things, the interconnection of physical devices to an information infrastructure. The paper therefore sets out to position the Internet of Things at the core of future developments in eHealt

The Right to the Sustainable Smart City

Environmental concerns have driven an interest in sustainable smart cities, through the monitoring and optimisation of networked infrastructures. At the same time, there are concerns about who these interventions and services are for, and who benefits. HCI researchers and designers interested in civic life have started to call for the democratisation of urban space through resistance and political action to challenge state and corporate claims. This paper contributes to an emerging body of work that seeks to involve citizens in the design of sustainable smart cities, particularly in the context of marginalised and culturally diverse urban communities. We present a study involving co- designing Internet of Things with urban agricultural communities and discuss three ways in which design can participate in the right to the sustainable smart city through designing for the commons, care, and biocultural diversity

Managing a portal of digital web resources by content syndication

As users become more accustomed to continuous Internet access, they will have less patience with the offering of disparate resources. A new generation of portals is being designed that aids users in navigating resource space and in processing the data they retrieved. Such portals offer added value by means of content syndication: the effort to have multiple, federated? resources co-operate in order to profit optimally from their synergy. A portal that offers these advantages, however, can only be of lasting value if it is sustainable. We sketch a way to set up and run an organisation that can manage a content syndication portal in a sustainable way.\ud \u