Raising awareness for potential sustainability effects in Uganda: A survey-based empirical study

Copyright © 2019 for this paper by its authors. In July 2019, we ran the 3rd International BRIGHT summer school for Software Engineering and Information Systems at the Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. The participants developed a group project over the course of the week, which included the application of the Sustainability Awareness Framework. The framework promotes discussion on the impact of software systems on sustainability based on a set of questions. In this paper, we present the educational evaluation of the Sustainability Awareness Framework in a country in Sub-Saharan Africa. The results indicate that the framework can provide supportive guidance of the societal and environmental challenges in the given context

HCI and environmental public policy:opportunities for engagement

This note discusses opportunities for the HCI community to engage with environmental public policy. It draws on insights and observations made during the primary author’s recent work for a policy unit at Global Affairs Canada, which is a federal ministry of the Government of Canada. During that work, the primary author identified several domains of environmental public policy that are of direct relevance to the HCI commu- nity. This note contributes a preliminary discussion of how, why, with whom, and in what capacity HCI researchers and practitioners might engage with three types of environmental public policy: climate change, waste electrical and electronic equipment, and green ICT procurement policies. This builds on existing public policy and environmental knowledge within the HCI community and responds directly to calls from some members to engage with environmental public policy

Everything is INTERRELATED:Teaching Software Engineering for Sustainability

Sustainability has become an important concern across many disciplines,and software systems play an increasingly central role in addressing it. However, teaching students from software engineering and related disciplines to effectively act in this space requires interdisciplinary courses that combines the concep to of sustainability with software engineering practice and principles. Yet, presently little guidance exist on which subjects and materials to cover in such courses and how, combined with a lack of reusable learning objects. This paper describes a summer school course on Software Engineering for Sustainability (SE4S). We provide a blueprint for this course, in the hope that it can help the community develop a shared approach and methods to teaching SE4S. Practical lessons learned from delivery of this course are also reported here, and could help iterate over the course materials, structure, and guidance for future improvements. The course blueprint, availability of used materials and report of the study results make this course viable for replication and further improvement

This Changes Sustainable HCI

More than a decade into Sustainable HCI (SHCI) research, the community is still struggling to converge on a shared understanding of sustainability and HCI’s role in addressing it. We think this is largely a positive sign, reflective of maturity; yet, lacking a clear set of aims and metrics for sustainability continues to be the community’s impediment to progressing, hence we seek to articulate a vision around which the community can productively coalesce. Drawing from recent SHCI publications, we identify commonalities that might form the basis of a shared understanding, and we show that this understanding closely aligns with the authoritative conception of a path to a sustainable future proffered by Naomi Klein in her book This Changes Everything. We elaborate a set of contributions that SHCI is already making that can be unified under Klein’s narrative, and compare these categories of work to those found in past surveys of the field as evidence of substantive progress in SHCI

Naming the pain in requirements engineering : Contemporary problems, causes, and effects in practice

Requirements Engineering (RE) has received much attention in research and practice due to its importance to software project success. Its interdisciplinary nature, the dependency to the customer, and its inherent uncertainty still render the discipline difficult to investigate. This results in a lack of empirical data. These are necessary, however, to demonstrate which practically relevant RE problems exist and to what extent they matter. Motivated by this situation, we initiated the Naming the Pain in Requirements Engineering (NaPiRE) initiative which constitutes a globally distributed, bi-yearly replicated family of surveys on the status quo and problems in practical RE. In this article, we report on the qualitative analysis of data obtained from 228 companies working in 10 countries in various domains and we reveal which contemporary problems practitioners encounter. To this end, we analyse 21 problems derived from the literature with respect to their relevance and criticality in dependency to their context, and we complement this picture with a cause-effect analysis showing the causes and effects surrounding the most critical problems. Our results give us a better understanding of which problems exist and how they manifest themselves in practical environments. Thus, we provide a first step to ground contributions to RE on empirical observations which, until now, were dominated by conventional wisdom only.Peer reviewe

Massively distributed authorship of academic papers

Wiki-like or crowdsourcing models of collaboration can provide a number of benefits to academic work. These techniques may engage expertise from different disciplines, and potentially increase productivity. This paper presents a model of massively distributed collaborative authorship of academic papers. This model, developed by a collective of thirty authors, identifies key tools and techniques that would be necessary or useful to the writing process. The process of collaboratively writing this paper was used to discover, negotiate, and document issues in massively authored scholarship. Our work provides the first extensive discussion of the experiential aspects of large-scale collaborative researc

Systems thinking and efficiency under emissions constraints: Addressing rebound effects in digital innovation and policy

Innovations and efficiencies in digital technology have lately been depicted as paramount in the green transition to enable the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, both in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector and the wider economy. This, however, fails to adequately account for rebound effects that can offset emission savings and, in the worst case, increase emissions. In this perspective, we draw on a transdisciplinary workshop with 19 experts from carbon accounting, digital sustainability research, ethics, sociology, public policy, and sustainable business to expose the challenges of addressing rebound effects in digital innovation processes and associated policy. We utilize a responsible innovation approach to uncover potential ways forward for incorporating rebound effects in these domains, concluding that addressing ICT-related rebound effects ultimately requires a shift from an ICT efficiency-centered perspective to a “systems thinking” model, which aims to understand efficiency as one solution among others that requires constraints on emissions for ICT environmental savings to be realized

The human factor

This installment reports on five papers from the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering and its collocated events. These papers focus on human factors in software engineering, with the last three dealing with open source software

Collezionismo e mercato di disegni a Roma nella prima metà del Settecento : protagonisti, comprimari, comparse

Nel I capitolo (Lo stato degli studi) ho compiuto una ricognizione bibliografica sulla storia del collezionismo di disegni e stampe cercando di analizzare i problemi ancora aperti sull’argomento. Il capitolo successivo (Il contesto : mecenati, artisti, dilettanti delle arti) è dedicato alla ricostruzione della rete di relazioni che caratterizzò l’ambiente antiquario romano di primo Settecento. Partendo dalla figura di Nicola Pio ho potuto chiarire meglio i suoi legami con l’antiquario Pietro Santi Bartoli e il canonico Vincenzo Vittoria, oltre a ricostruire il suo entourage attraverso l’individuazione di personaggi quasi sconosciuti come il protonotario Odoardo de Silva, i collezionisti Lazzaro e Ludovico Leonetti, il padre cistercense Giovanni Guerrero. Ho inoltre ricostruito la figura del priore Francesco Antonio Renzi, una delle più interessanti all’interno di questa ricerca e analizzato la figura del cardinal Gualtieri attraverso lo studio della sua corrispondenza e del suo Diario conservati a Londra. Sulla scorta di un manoscritto conservato a Bologna ho trovato ulteriori notizie sull’ambiente antiquario romano e su Vittoria, attraverso il carteggio tra il pittore Ludovico Antonio David e il biografo Pellegrino Orlandi, in rapporto anche con il priore Renzi. Nel III capitolo (Le principali raccolte romane: formazione, consistenza, allestimento, modelli e percorsi comuni), dopo una breve introduzione storica sulle tipologie delle raccolte di grafica, le sue teorizzazioni e i suoi archetipi nel Cinquecento, ho cercato di isolare le categorie più ricorrenti nelle collezioni di disegni e stampe che coincidono con le “classi” identificate da Quiccheberg nel 1565 (artificiosa, naturalia, instrumenta, figure concettuali) e di verificarne la presenza nelle raccolte dei dilettanti romani, allo scopo di individuare una matrice culturale comune ad essi. Mi sono soffermata sulla funzione del disegno come strumento di conoscenza, e quindi sulla concezione, comune ai vari collezionisti, di raccolta intesa come strumento per tracciare un disegno storico dell’arte italiana. Infine ho indagato la metodologia che accomuna la formazione delle principali raccolte romane, individuando in padre Resta un modello di riferimento per i dilettanti romani, in particolare Nicola Pio, Francesco Antonio Renzi e Vincenzo Vittoria. Il IV e ultimo capitolo (La dispersione delle collezioni: il silenzio delle fonti) si apre con una panoramica sulla dispersione delle principali raccolte romane intorno alla metà del Settecento malgrado i provvedimenti pontifici di tutela del patrimonio artistico. Ho analizzato la difficoltà di ricostruire e documentare le vendite delle maggiori raccolte alienate all'estero per una sostanziale mancanza di documenti, e ho esposto le direzioni di ricerca esplorate, purtroppo senza risultati considerevoli: schede Garampi presso l’ASV. Archivio di Michel-Ange de La Chausse a Nantes e archivio Gualtieri a Londra e ho illustrato i problemi relativi alle ricerche intorno alle raccolte di Vittoria, Pio, Renzi, Pier Leone Ghezzi, ecc. I documenti emersi nel corso della ricerca sono integralmente trascritti nell'Appendice Documentaria