The systems we build are never neutral. They can magnify harm or support a just and sustainable society. How we build today shapes tomorrow’s possibilities.
Don't Take the Black Pill - Andrew Kelley | SSW 2026
Evaluating Sustainable Digitalization: A Carbon-Aware Framework for Enhancing Eco-Friendly Business Process Reengineering
In an era where sustainability is paramount, understanding the environmental impact of digitalizing business processes is critical. Despite the growing emphasis on sustainable practices, there is a lack of comprehensive methodologies to evaluate how digitalization impacts environmental sustainability compared to traditional processes. This paper introduces a carbon-aware methodological framework specifically designed to assess the sustainability of business process reengineering through digitalization. The Digital Green framework quantitatively analyzes the environmental costs associated with digital transformation, ensuring that truly sustainable digitalization results in lower resource consumption relative to the complexity of the process being digitalized. To demonstrate its effectiveness, the framework was applied to a case study involving the reengineering of an administrative process at a small university in southern Italy. The case study highlighted the framework’s ability to quantify the environmental benefits or detriments of digital transformation, thus guiding organizations toward more sustainable digital practices. This research contributes to the field by offering a concrete tool for aligning digitalization efforts with ecological sustainability, and by paving the way for integration with initiatives such as the Green Software Foundation’s Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) specifications.
Sustainable Open Source: The Maintainers Perspective or: How I Learned to Stop Caring and Love Open Source
Prosperous Software Movement | Open Source Observer
Bringing sustainable funding to public goods by revenue-sharing towards dependencies
The Next Two Years of Software Engineering
Exploring five critical questions shaping software engineering through 2026, with contrasting scenarios for each. These lenses help prepare for the evolving ...
Why I Didn’t Sign the Resonant Computing Manifesto: The Foundations Need Work
The Resonant Computing Manifesto speaks to humane tech, but its foundations don't address issues of power, accountability, and community. I wrote this to name what’s missing and suggest commitments that would give this manifesto teeth.
The Green Side of the Lua
The United Nations' 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development highlights the importance of energy-efficient software to reduce the global carbon footprint. Programming languages and execution models...
Open Source Resistance
A direct-action manifesto for maintainers keeping open source alive on company time.
Digital Degrowth: Radically Rethinking our Digital Futures
We are fast approaching the point of “peak digital”, with the continued mass production and excessive consumption of digital technologies set to become a key driver of climate crisis, ecological breakdown and ongoing societal instability.<br /> <br /><i>Digital Degrowth</i> is a call to completely rethink our digital futures in these fast-changing times. It explores how degrowth thinking and alternate forms of “radically sustainable computing” might support ambitions of sustainable, scaled-down and equitable ways of living with digital technologies. Neil Selwyn proposes a rebalancing of digital technology use: digital degrowth is not a call for simply making reduced use of the digital technologies that we already have – rather it is an argument to reimagine digital practices that maximise societal benefits with minimal environmental and social impact. Drawing on illustrative examples from across computer science, hacker and environmental activist communities, this book examines how core degrowth principles of conviviality, autonomy and care are already being used to reimagine alternate forms of digital technology.<br /> <br />Original and stimulating, this is essential reading for students and scholars of media and communication, sustainability studies, political ecology, computer/data sciences, and across the social sciences.
Software Bonkers
I’m software bonkers: I can’t stop thinking about software. And I can’t stop building software.
doctrine — vit
The vit doctrine: software should live. A social system for personalized software where the unit of exchange is capability.
doctrine — vit
The vit doctrine: software should live. A social system for personalized software where the unit of exchange is capability.
Roadmap: Open Source
After years of investing in open source software, we’re releasing our thinking on what positions these companies as emerging technology giants.
A Systems Literacy Manifesto
In 1968, West Churchman wrote, “…there is a good deal of turmoil about the manner in which our society is run. …the citizen has begun to suspect that the people who make major decisions that affect our lives don’t know what they are doing.”[1] Churchman was writing at a time of growing concern about war, civil rights, and the environment. Almost fifty years later, these concerns remain, and we have more reason than ever “to suspect that the people who make major decisions that affect our lives don’t know what they are doing.” Examples abound.