From Data Literacy to Co-design Environmental Monitoring Innovations and Civic Action

Funding Information: Acknowledgments. We would like to thank all the volunteers, partners, and authors who wrote and provided helpful comments for this publication writing process. We gratefully acknowledge the support from the Finnish Cultural Foundation for South Karelia Region and the PERCCOM programme. We also give our gratitude for South-East Finland – Russia CBC programme for supporting AWARE project, funded by the European Union, the Russian Federation and the Republic of Finland as the funding has made it possible for publishing this work and disseminate the knowledge. Publisher Copyright: © 2022, The Author(s).SENSEI is an environmental monitoring initiative run by Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT University) and the municipality of Lappeenranta in south-east Finland. The aim was to collaboratively innovate and co-design, develop and deploy civic technologies with local civics to monitor positive and negative issues. These are planned to improve local’s participation to social governance issues in hand. These issues can be e.g. waste related matters like illegal dumping of waste, small vandalism into city properties, alien plant species, but on the other hand nice places to visits too. This publication presents initiatives data literacy facet overview, which is aimed at creating equitable access to information from open data, which in turn is hoped for to increase participants motivation and entrepreneurship like attitude to work with the municipals and the system. This is done by curating environmental datasets to allow participatory sensemaking via exploration, games and reflection, allowing citizens to combine their collective knowledge about the town with the often-complex data. The ultimate aim of this data literacy process is to enhance collective civic actions for the good of the environment, to reduce the resource burden in the municipality level and help citizens to be part of sustainability and environmental monitoring innovation activities. For further research, we suggest follow up studies to consider on similar activities e.g. in specific age groups and to do comparisons on working with different stage holders to pin point most appropriate methods for any specific focus group towards collaborative innovation and co-design of civic technologies deployment.Peer reviewe

Code camps and hackathons in education - literature review and lessons learned

Motivation: Code camps and hackathons been used in education for almost two decades. These approaches are usually intensive and for most times quite practical events for solving some real-world problems with various educational objectives. The objectives and structures of these events differ depending on the role of the event in curricula. Problem statement: Both code camps and hackathons been implemented in various ways, with varying success levels. As expected the implementation of the event varies considerably depending on the objectives set for the event, but that then leads to the difficulty and problem setting to understand what organizing of these events actually mean. For educational context, curricula have also its role in defining the targeted skills and competencies the events has to consider too. Approach: We applied a systematic literature review (SLR) to look at the various definitions and modes of these events. Whether it is called “code camp”, or “hackathon”, or anything else with the same basic meaning, we want to find out what skills and competencies these events emphasize, how they are used in Computer Science (CS) and Software Engineering (SE) education and what are the general structures of the actual arranged events. Contribution: It is aim of this SLR to i) identify various possible ways of implementing these intensive events, and ii) reflect the results to the lessons we have learned of almost two decades of various intensive code camps and hackathons we have been organizing building and participating into. Based on the results, we claim that there is tremendous potential of using these events in education and in the curriculum than how it has been applied so far

SENSEI:Harnessing Community Wisdom for Local Environmental Monitoring in Finland

The way people participate in decision making has radically changed over the last few decades. Technology has facilitated the sharing of knowledge, ideas and opinions across social structures and, has allowed grass-root initiatives to flourish. Participatory civic technology has helped local communities to embrace civic action on matters of shared concern. In this case study, we describe SENSEI, a year-long participatory sensing movement. Local community organisations, decision makers, families, individuals and researchers worked together to co-create civic technologies to help them address environmental issues of shared interest, such as invasive plant species, abandoned items in the forests and nice places. Over 240 local participants have taken part to the different stages of this year long process which included ten community events and workshops. As a result, over hundred concrete ideas about issues of common interest were generated, nearly thirty civic tech prototypes were designed and developed, along hundreds of environmental observations. In this paper, we describe the process or orchestration of this initiative and present key reflections from it

New promises AI brings into circular economy accelerated product design: a review on supporting literature

Promoting and applying circular strategies in the product planning stage by industrial designers have significant environmental impacts. Product design has an enormous influence on sustainable ecology. Huge amounts of data analysis in designing circular products as well as reducing human biases in testing and prototyping are the main reasons for urging digital technologies in industries. Digitalization assets in ecodesign in collaboration with humans and as a complement for human skills. This study found the circular design tools and strategies which can help organizations in their product designs and the way artificial intelligence enhances product circularity. Real-time data transformation and analysis ability can help in massive data analysis which is less time consuming and less energy consumption is needed. In addition, rapid prototyping and fast testing will reduce the waste in design process. Furthermore, AI transfers precise data and information on materials and products’ availability, condition, and accessibility which makes easy monitoring and enables remote maintenance as well as reuse, remanufacturing and repair opportunities

Analysis of the Past Seven Years of Waste-Related Doctoral Dissertations: A Digitalization and Consumer e-Waste Studies Mystery

Solving global sustainability challenges is based on a well-researched understanding of the corresponding underlying problems, key contributing factors, and current state-of-the-art. Utilizing the scope of recent doctoral studies is one potent way to map current young researchers nowadays and near future research focus areas and directions. Here, the authors focused on waste management, especially, mapping dissertations on the grooving global challenge of electronic waste. Currently, this is the first scoping study of its kind, about e-waste -related trends within the circle of waste management-related doctoral studies. Apparently, in a waste-related context, dissertations have a low interest in directly focusing on the topic of consumable e-waste, even though this waste stream is the world’s fastest-growing domestic waste stream. Only a handful of doctoral dissertations, related to e-waste management, were found in the study. In a more general waste-related benchmarking/comparing mapping search, the ProQuest Digital Dissertations database was found to contain 201 dissertations between the years 2015 and 2022, covering waste matters in general. E-waste was covered in six of these 201 dissertations. These six did not have any real overlapping between each other and their research areas. Further thesis content analysis revealed e-waste topics to be currently addressed through consumer behavior, material recovery processes, forecasting, and robotics. The need for future research in the areas of consumable e-waste management is also widely discussed

Exploring the Social Trend Indications of Utilizing E-Commerce during and after COVID-19’s Hit

COVID-19 is a major global crisis affecter, changing global norms and societal behavioral models. Many companies have faced existential crises, but on the other hand, businesses that were and are helping others to boost digitalization, ICT and software solutions deployment, remote communications integration, e-commerce & e-services, and so on, have boosted their businesses, as people shifted online during the global lockdown and international travel restrictions. Our work explores the trend of e-commerce and e-services utilization during the ease of restrictions and the social distancing period to forecast the trend continuation patterns after the pandemic. An online survey was conducted and targeted individuals in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, resulting in 155 participants. The data were analyzed from four perspectives: demographics, COVID-19 health impact, trend analysis, and regression analysis. The results indicate heavy utilization of e-commerce and e-services during the global movement restrictions and travel bans. This trend has, however, significantly reduced during the ease of restrictions and social distancing period. Utilizing e-commerce and e-services in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, based on the research data, is positively correlated to the outbreak conditions. On the other hand, current data still does not give clear indications, and this pattern is going to be mostly, partly, or not at all permanent now as societies are returning to mostly a free movement of people and marginally restricted social distancing times

State of the art preliminary literature review: Sustainability and waste reporting capabilities in management systems

Inspired by previous studies research gap findings and limitations in management system functions to produce sustainabilityrelated reporting authors set a goal to map the current academic literature in the context of waste management systems. The method chosen for the work was a systematic literature review, focusing on the Web of Science and Scopus databases. The authors found a total of 115 unique publications from the selected databases, which were filtered 28 contributing studies. With these studies, this study found that most of the publications are journals and almost half of the work has been published in the last 3 years. Additionally, sustainability and waste management reporting related literature seem to enjoy wide appreciation among the peers, indicated by a high number of references these publications had gathered. As an overall finding, the specific research area of waste management process quantified data reporting seems really young overall and needs additional research with multiple research gaps clearly waiting for follow-up research to pinpoint the specific areas to contribute in the near future