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)

Explaining Multisourcing Decisions in Application Outsourcing

Multisourcing—the delegation of interdependent tasks to multiple vendors—is receiving increasing attention in practice and in research. Yet, we know little about the circumstances under which organizations choose multisourcing. In this paper, we draw on incomplete contracting theory and the knowledge-based view to explain multisourcing decisions in application projects. We test our model using a comprehensive dataset of 1093 sourcing decisions made by Swiss public organizations. The results provide strong support for the model. We find that clients choose multisourcing more frequently when (1) the project is large, (2) the software is client-specific and the project is large enough, (3) client and vendor lack joint experience, (4) the client seeks knowledge, (5) the technology is not proprietary, and (6) the client is experienced in outsourcing. While these findings support common views that clients choose multisourcing in response to opportunistic threats and to knowledge needs, the findings also shed light on prerequisites for multisourcing

Workshop on Contributions to Open Source: Software by Public Institutions

Cette thèse s’intéresse aux stratégies comportementales et physiologiques permettant à un oiseau colonial, le manchot royal, de se reproduire sous de fortes contraintes énergétiques (jeûne prolongé) et sociales (forte densité de congénères) potentiellement stressantes. Utilisant la fréquence cardiaque (FC) comme indicateur de la dépense énergétique et de la réponse au stress, elle considère : 1) le coût énergétique des comportements majeurs (confort et agressivité) du manchot royal se reproduisant à terre, questionnant leur signifiance évolutive; 2) les changements physiologiques (FC, température corporelle, activité physique) associés au jeûne reproductif le plus long (1 mois), révélant que la FC de repos des animaux est fortement influencée par la densité coloniale et suggérant un coût énergétique de la vie en groupe; 3) L’influence de l’environnement social, indiquant que lors d'interactions agressives la réponse cardiaque des animaux est modulée par leur implication dans l'interaction et par le risque associé; 4) Les effets du statut nutritionnel et reproductif sur les réponses cardiaques, hormonales et métaboliques à différents stress anthropiques aigus, démontrant que ces réponses varient en fonction de la valeur relative de la reproduction (œuf vs. poussin). L’atténuation de ces réponses, coûteuses en énergie et pouvant conduire à l'abandon de la progéniture, permettrait d’augmenter le succès reproducteur lorsque la valeur de la reproduction en cours est élevée. Des recherches futures permettront de déterminer les conséquences physiologiques (coût énergétique, stress oxydatif, vieillissement) du stress social chez des espèces vivant en groupe.This thesis investigates the behavioral and physiological strategies that allow a colonial breeder, the king penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus), to breed while fasting in a crowded, possibly stressful, social environment. First, by monitoring penguin heart rate (HR) as a proxy to energy expenditure, it considers the energy cost of the most common behaviors (comfort and aggressive behavior) of penguins breeding ashore, and questions the adaptive significance of high and low, respectively, energy investment into these two behaviours. Second, it investigates the physiological changes that occur during the longest breeding fast (1 month) by continuously recording HR, body temperature and physical activity in incubating males. It reveals that changes in colony density (i.e. crowding) may have a strong impact on the energy expended to fuel metabolism at rest, i.e. first evidence for an energy cost of group-living in birds. Third, it shows that penguins are highly sensitive to the social environment, as indicated by changes in HR responses to aggressive contexts of various relevance and associated risks. Fourth, it investigates the effects of breeding status on costly stress responses (hormonal, metabolic and cardiac). It shows that responses to acute stress decrease with increasing reproductive value of the offspring (egg vs. chick), suggesting that stress responses may be adaptively attenuated to improve breeding success and fitness, when reproductive value of the current reproduction is high. Further research is needed to investigate the physiological consequences (energy expenditure, oxidative stress, aging) of social stress in group-living animals

Mitschreiben an der digitalen Welt

Wer Computerprogramme schreiben kann, gestaltet die digitale Welt mit – alle anderen sind abhaengige Konsumenten. Deshalb sollten am besten schon Kinder die Kulturtechnik des Programmierens lernen. Entscheidend ist ausserdem, dass wir ueberhaupt mitschreiben duerfen – dafuer setzen sich die verschiedenen «Open»-Bewegungen ein

An empirical study on cross-x transfer for legal judgment prediction

Cross-lingual transfer learning has proven useful in a variety of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, but it is understudied in the context of legal NLP, and not at all in Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP). We explore transfer learning techniques on LJP using the trilingual Swiss-Judgment-Prediction dataset, including cases written in three languages. We find that cross-lingual transfer improves the overall results across languages, especially when we use adapter-based fine-tuning. Finally, we further improve the model's performance by augmenting the training dataset with machine-translated versions of the original documents, using a 3x larger training corpus. Further on, we perform an analysis exploring the effect of cross-domain and cross-regional transfer, i.e., train a model across domains (legal areas), or regions. We find that in both settings (legal areas, origin regions), models trained across all groups perform overall better, while they also have improved results in the worst-case scenarios. Finally, we report improved results when we ambitiously apply cross-jurisdiction transfer, where we further augment our dataset with Indian legal cases

MultiLegalSBD: A Multilingual Legal Sentence Boundary Detection Dataset

Sentence Boundary Detection (SBD) is one of the foundational building blocks of Natural Language Processing (NLP), with incorrectly split sentences heavily influencing the output quality of downstream tasks. It is a challenging task for algorithms, especially in the legal domain, considering the complex and different sentence structures used. In this work, we curated a diverse multilingual legal dataset consisting of over 130’000 annotated sentences in 6 languages. Our experimental results indicate that the performance of existing SBD models is subpar on multilingual legal data. We trained and tested monolingual and multilingual models based on CRF, BiLSTM-CRF, and transformers, demonstrating state-of-the art performance. We also show that our multilingual models outperform all baselines in the zero-shot setting on a Portuguese test set. To encourage further research and development by the community, we have made our dataset, models, and code publicly available

Security implications of digitalization: The dangers of data colonialism and the way towards sustainable and sovereign management of environmental data

Digitalization opens up new opportunities in the collection, analysis, and presentation of data which can contribute to the achievement of the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In particular, the access to and control of environmental and geospatial data is fundamental to identify and understand global issues and trends. Also immediate crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrate the importance of accurate health data such as infection statistics and the relevance of digital tools like video conferencing platforms. However, today much of the data is collected and processed by private actors. Thus, governments and researchers depend on data platforms and proprietary systems of big tech companies such as Google or Microsoft. The market capitalization of the seven largest US and Chinese big tech companies has grown to 8.7tn USD in recent years, about twice the size of Germany's gross domestic product (GDP). Therefore, their market power is enormous, allowing them to dictate many rules of the digital space and even interfere with legislations. Based on a literature review and nine expert interviews this study presents a framework that identifies the risks and consequences along the workflow of collecting, processing, storing, using of data. It also includes solutions that governmental and multilateral actors can strive for to alleviate the risks. Fundamental to this framework is the novel concept of "data colonialism" which describes today's trend of private companies appropriating the digital sphere. Historically, colonial nations used to grab indigenous land and exploit the cheap labor of slave workers. In a similar way, today's big tech corporations use cheap data of their users to produce valuable services and thus create enormous market power.Comment: This study was prepared under contract to the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA). The authors bear responsibility for the conten