In 2029, we will...

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I wrote a blog post only a little more than three weeks ago about "My submission to ICT for Sustainability (ICT4S) 2029". That blog post described the idea of creating visions of the world 15 years from now and the role of using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for sustainability purposes at that time and place. I submitted no less than four scenarion - two written together with Baki Cakici and all in the form of 150-word long abstracts of future research papers that we "will write" 15 years from now. All four were accepted for inclusion in the paper.

For the sake of completeness (I always write a blog post each time I submit something), this blog post is about my third contribution to the upcoming ICT4S conference (here are the blog posts about the other two papers I have submitted). It turns out no less than 19 (!) scenarios were accepted to the paper "ICT4S 2029: What will be the Systems Supporting Sustainability in 15 Years?". Birgit Penzenstadler is the first author and she has done the major part of the work of putting the paper together (since the paper is more than just the sum of the 19 scenarios). People in bold below are the heroes who helped frame and make an academic paper out of these 19 diverse scenarios. I am author number 22 (!) out of that paper's no less than 29 (!) authors. I have never written a paper before with more than four authors altogether, but if that record of mine is to be broken, why not break it with class? Here are all the 29 co-authors, organised by educational institution (half the authors are from UCI):

University of California, Irvine, USA:
Birgit Penzenstadler, Bill Tomlinson, Marcel Pufal, Ankita Raturi, Debra Richardson, Lynn Dombrowski, Gillian R. Hayes, Melissa Mazmanian, Sahand Nayebaziz, Juliet Norton, Donald J. Patterson, Kristin Roher, M. Six Silberman, Kevin Simonson, André van der Hoek

KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Malin Picha Edvardsson, Elina Eriksson, Daniel Pargman

Université Paul Sabatier, France
Georges Da Costa, Christina Herzog, Jean-Marc Pierson

Cornell University, USA
Eric Baumer

Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS), Sweden
Baki Cakici

University of Leicester, UK
Ruzanna Chitchyan

Universitat Polytecnica de Catalunya
Xavier Franch

University of Zürich
Wolfgang Lohmann

University of Naumur, Belgium
Martin Mahaux

Rolls-Royce PLC
Alistar Mavin

University of Kansas, USA
Andrew W. Torrance

That's a lot of authors. I felt I needed some other way to make a finer distinction between authors who had put a lot (or less) time into creating these scenarios. Here are the top contributors in terms of co-authorship (number of scenarios):

Bill Tomlinson (8), Debra Richardson (5), Donald J. Patterson, Daniel Pargman (4), Ankita Raturi (3), Juliet Norton, Baki Caciki (2), everyone else (1).

It's of course not a competition. But. Still. Bill (who started by writing up a bunch of drafts that others contributed to) is irritatingly far "ahead" so I obviously needed to invent some other kind of metric to "catch up". Right? I hereby bare all my nerdiness (again) and decide that you get 1 point if you are the single author of a scenario, 1/2 if two persons collaborated and 1/4 if there were four contributors to a scenario. At the risk of angering my gracious UCI hosts (and a bunch of other people), the new list then looks now like this:

Daniel Pargman (3), Bill Tomlinson (2.34), Debra Richardson (1.62), Donald J. Patterson (1.12), Baki Cakici, Ruzanna Chitchyan, Xavier Franch, Wolfgang Lohmann (1), Ankita Raturi (0.87),  Juliet Norton, Kristin Roher, Malin Picha Eriksson, Elina Eriksson, Martin Mahaux, Alistar Mavin (1/2), everyone else (<1/2)

I'm first on that list - what a fortuitous coincidence! After that long and pretty pointless exercise, here is the paper abstract:

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ICT4S 2029: What will be the Systems Supporting Sustainability in 15 Years?

Research is often inspired by visions of the future. These vision can take on various narrative forms, and can fall anywhere along the spectrum from utopian to dystopian.
Even though we recognize the importance of such visions to help us shape research questions and inspire rich design spaces to be explored, the opportunity to discuses them is rarely given in a research context.
Imagine how civilization will have changed in 15 years. What is your vision for systems that will be supporting sustainability in that time? Which transformational changes will have occurred in the mean time that allow for these systems? Is ICT even the right tool or does it contradict sustainability by making our world even more complex? How can we make systems and our societies more sustainable and resilient by ICT4S?
This paper presents a compilation of fictional abstracts for inspiration and discussion, and provides mean to stimulate discussion on future research and contributors to ICT4S community building.

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Inspired by a contribution to the alt.chi track in the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems [2], we sent out a call for fictional abstracts for papers on ICT4S systems that might appear in the ICT4S conference in the year 2029. This call made the process explicit that abstracts would be compiled into a paper with the above title and submitted to the regular review process of this year's edition of the ICT4S conference. A time span of 15 years (the fictional context of ICT4S 2029) seemed appropriate to allow for creativity and significant paradigm change sin the future scenarios but not too far in the future to result in abstracts that are totally disconnected from the present. The abstracts were required to be 150 words long, to provide a title for the fictional future paper, and to optionally include an image as well. Abstracts were then selected for inclusion based on their ability to represent a diversity of guiding research visions, their excitatory or provocative potential, and the likelihood of engendering conversations about the future of ICT4S.

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