This text has been originally published as a chapter in The Open Book, published by the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Finnish Institute in London. It is available to download in the archive and the texts, including this one, are published under creative commons attribution share-alike. These ideas are discussed further in my upcoming dissertation.

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Sustainability is a normative concept, building on ideas such as justice, equity and responsibility, and based on human culture and society [14]. Computers and internet and the technologies that are central in our current societal paradigm of informationalism [23] are not value-free neither. They embed normative values and a culture that can be understood both from the historical origins of the technology and the current community around it. But the work looking at computer technology and sustainability has been oriented towards practical applications for solving practical problems, and it has overlooked the more normative and ethical perspectives.  The research have focused either at understanding the negative direct impacts of hardware such as energy use of internet and the generation of e-waste [1,2], or at the applications of using the technologies with a sustainability purpose, such as increasing the efficiency of systems and increasing dematerialization or triggering behavioral change [3,4]. Computers and internet are treated either as a system to be understood, or as tools that can be used for some purpose.
The set of values that has been central to the development of the personal computer as we know it is the hacker ethic. Being a hacker, is being someone that “program enthusiastically” and who believe that computing and information sharing is a positive good”, and that it is their ethical duty to facilitate access [5]. This is not to be confused with the use of the term in media and popular culture, where it is used mostly connected to cybercriminals, computer experts that steal credit card numbers and break in security systems [6]. The hacker ethic originated at MIT and developed in academia during the second half of the nineteenth century (See Levy’s historical account [7] and Raymond’s brief history of hackerdom [8]), and it contains a set of values and norm that were embodied in their work [9]: Access to computers should be unlimited and total, All information should be free; Mistrust Authority, promote decentralization; Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not by “bogus” criteria such as degrees, age or race; You can create art and beauty on a computer; Computers can change your life (and the world) for the better.
The hacker ethic is present in many of the information technologies we use today, especially internet, which has the hacker ethic values at its core, and the technologies and services around it. Open source software such as Linux, Firefox or Android is used by millions of users and have been demonstrated to be a successful model based on intrinsic motivation [10]. The openness of information for instance in the use of creative commons licenses and open data is also becoming widely accepted. As example the online photo service Flickr hosts now more than 200 million creative common licensed pictures [11]. During the last years there has been a renascence of the term hack, using hack and hacker in the sense of sharing information, tweaking, hands-on change, being used not only to computer related activities, but also to things as personal development, furniture or gardening. These communities may not hack in the traditional perspective, but they share the principles of openness and creativity of the hacker ethic. The hacker ethic as defined by the jargon file [9], its master document, does not only not exclude, but welcomes any kind of non computer activity as part of the hacker community, “An expert or enthusiast of any kind”.
Pekka Himmanen, in his book “The hacker ethic” [12], argues that the hacker values represents a different work ethic that challenges the dominant protestant work ethic. Himanen discusses the current dominance of the protestant ethic as defined by Weber [13], tracing its origin to the monastery. In this ethic, work is seen as a duty that must be done for itself, the purpose of the work is not to get something done, but “to humble the worker’s soul by making what he is told”. Some of the defining characteristics are the emergence of the clock and fixed hours as control, money is the main motive, being busy is a status symbol and playfulness being removed from work. This protestant ethic is now secular and central in the capitalist system. The book defines the hacker work ethic in opposition to the protestant ethic, pointing the origins to the academia. The defining characteristics is having plenty of time (skhole), being able to organize one’s time oneself, the main motivation is not money, but passion. Not working for work’s sake but for creating something valuable together. For good, for kudos, for fun. This work ethic does not oppose work, as Himanen presents the pre-protestant work ethic that was leisure-centric, but abandons the duality work/leisure, again focusing the motivation around passion. Openness of information is presented by Himanen as a key concept for the hacker ethic, again connecting the academia as a role model. Other important concepts being freedom of speech, privacy, passion and creativity.
While many of the sustainability problems are practical, such as reducing carbon dioxide emissions or pollution, sustainability in itself is a normative concept based on values. Sustainability is about justice, intergenerational and intragenerational and about how we want society to be for us humans [14]. Sustainability is not only about technological fixes, but it needs a broader change of how we do things, how and why we work, how we deal with knowledge and how we innovate. The hacker ethic provides an alternative work ethic, challenging the status quo, can be an important contribution to sustainability. Openness and a hands-on approach are the main two concepts that can be argued to be the most relevant for sustainability.
Openness of information lays in the core of the hacker ethic. Open source, open knowledge, open data, creative commons, have shown that there are alternatives ways of dealing with information based on creating and improving the commons, based on collaboration, in community. They have challenged the status quo of the existing business models and proven pragmatically also a more efficient way of working. Sustainability and problems such as climate change are the “wickedest” problem we have to deal with [15]. It will require society to collaborate, to create together new knowledge, new ways of doing things, we do not have the time to try to fight each other over trademarks [16]. We need open data about the state of the planet, we need transparency about emissions and the impact of products and industries, we need feedback, we need accountability. We need to export the open licenses to other areas key to a sustainable society, as the people from Architecture for Humanity are doing with architecture [17], as institutions as MIT and Harvard are doing with education [18], as people as Vandana Shiva are advocating for seeds and traditional knowledge [19].
Together with openness, the “Hands-on imperative” is central to the hacker ethic. This points both to the need to bring computers to the people, and to the focus on doing and working hands-on with the systems as a way of learning and demonstrating ideas. The access question is coming from a time where computer resources, even at institutions like MIT, were scarce, highly regulated and bureaucratic, but it is still relevant to many places and social groups, where the access to technology and connectivity is still lacking. This hacker values of bringing computer to the masses can be seen in projects working to close the digital divide, such as the OLPC [20].
The imperative of working hands-on is still one of the central ones of the hacker ethic, hackers focuses on results over ideas. Do you have a good idea? get your fingers moving and code it. Do you want to defend open source? Shut up and show them the code [21]. Get excited and make things [22], this philosophy is highly visible in hacker communities such as the maker culture, events as hackathons and code fests, but even in the way internet entrepreneurs and companies work.
In the hacker ethic there is also a belief that “computers can change your life (and the world) for the better”. This belief is reinforced by the fast transformation achieved by computer technology during the last decades, making computers available to the masses, internet growing exponentially reaching billions of users and becoming a central part of how society communicates and mobile phones becoming the most widespread technological device in history. All these transformations are based on a practical approach, a belief that “the best way to predict the future is to invent it” [24]. This focus in doing things is very relevant to sustainability. We need to change how society works, we need to improve technology, we need to move from talking to doing.
Computers, internet, new technologies can play an important role in moving towards sustainability. I argue that their role goes beyond the technical applications and it is not limited to applications like increased efficiency or better communication. The new way of doing things embodied in the hacker ethic presents a challenge to the status quo. The values of passion and creativity, openness and sharing, the creation of commons, the community oriented thinking, the hand-on approach, should be important values for a sustainable society. We need to keep promoting these values, to keep showing how they can create a better society. We need to open up knowledge, to prototype and iterate towards sustainability. And we need to do it fast.

Acknowledgements

The ideas in this text were discussed during the OKFestival, in the Future, Openness and Sustainability session, the Green Hackathon and all the interesting conversations during that week. Thanks to the rest of the team involved at the sustainability stream: Velichka Dimitrova (thanks for the comment and review), Jack Townsend, Chris Adams, James Smith, Hannes Ebner, Guo Xu, and to the rest of the people that participated in our stream and in this great event.

Footnotes
[1] Malmodin, J., Moberg, Å., Lundén, D., Finnveden, G. and Lövehagen, N. 2010. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Operational Electricity Use in the ICT and Entertainment & Media Sectors. Journal of Industrial Ecology 14, 770-790
[2] Kuehr, R. Williams, E. 2004. Computers and the Environment – Understanding and Managing their Impacts. Kluwer Academic Publishers & United Nations University. Dordrecht/Boston/London.
[3] DiSalvo, C. Sengers, P. Brynjarsdóttir, H. 2010. Mapping the landscape of sustainable HCI. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1975-1984. DOI=10.1145/1753326.1753625
[4] Climate Group, The. 2008. Smart2020: Enabling the low carbon economy in the information age. GeSI (Global e-sustainability initiative) http://www.theclimategroup.org/assets/resources/publications/Smart2020Report.pdf
[5] Wark, M. 2006. Hackers. Theory Culture Society 2006 23: 320
[6] Nissenbaum, H. 2004. Hackers and the contested ontology of cyberspace. New media & society. Vol6(2):195-217.
[7] Levy, . 1984. Hackers, heroes of the computer revolution. Dell/Doubleday, New York NY. ISBN 0-385-31210-5
[8] Raymond, E.S. 2000. A Brief History of Hackerdom. http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/hacker-history/
[9]  The hacker Jargon http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/index.html
[10] Lakhani, Karim R. and Wolf, Robert G., Why Hackers Do What They Do: Understanding Motivation and Effort in Free/Open Source Software Projects. MIT Sloan Working Paper No. 4425-03. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.443040
[11] See http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/
[12] Himmanen, P. 2001.The hacker ethic. New York: Random House.
[13] Weber, M. 1905. The protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Available at: http://archive.org/details/protestantethics00webe
[14] United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development. 1987. Our Common Future. Oxford University Press.
[15] Levin, K., B. Cashore, S. Bernstein and G. Auld. 2009. Playing it forward: Path dependency, progressive incrementalism, and the “Super Wicked” problem of global climate change. IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science 50 (6). Bibcode 2009E&ES….6X2002L. Doi:10.1088/1755-1307/6/50/502002
[16] A short introduction to architecture for humanity and open source architecture: Cameron Sinclair at TED 2006: http://www.ted.com/talks/cameron_sinclair_on_open_source_architecture.html : More info about open source architecture: http://www.domusweb.it/en/op-ed/open-source-architecture-osarc-/
[17] See: https://www.edx.org/
[18]  For a short introduction see the video: Shiva V. Seeds of open source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfNCCJECpss For more information see for instance: Shiva, V. 2000. Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, South End Press, Cambridge Massachusetts.
[19] Example of trademark and intellectual propierty slowing sustainability can be found in cradle to cradle: http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/danielle-sacks/ad-verse-effect/william-mcdonough-must-change and in the urban homesteading trademark controversy: http://sierrapermaculture.com/?p=255 and   https://www.eff.org/cases/petition-cancel-urban-homestead-trademark
[20] See: http://one.laptop.org/[21] Raymond, E.S. 1999. Shut up and show them the code. http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/shut-up-and-show-them.html
[22] See: http://magicalnihilism.com/2009/11/07/get-excited-and-make-things/
[23] Castells, M. 1996. The Rise of the Network Society. (The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Volume I). Blackwell Publishers.
[24] Kay, A. 1989. Predicting The Future. Standford Engineering 1(1): 1-6

Last month (I’m slow updating..) I went to the Open Knowledge Festival in Helsinki, organized by the Open Knowledge Foundation. I was a guest program planner at the Sustainability Stream, together with a great team including Velickha and Guo from OKFN, Chris from AMEE, James from Cleanweb uk, Jack from U. of Southampton and my colleague Hannes. It was a pretty intense week and you can see a good summary at the OKFN Open Economics blog.

I had a small session where we discussed openness and the hacker ethic as a value for sustainability. The idea being that while most of the discussion around open knowledge and sustainability is around the use of open data as a tool for sustainability purposes (which I agree with), the normative part of why we think a sustainable society ought to include the values of openness and increase transparency are not usually discussed. I will post my thought about this later on at more length.

There were quite  many interesting presentations and keynotes. Worth mentioning was Hans Rosling’s presentation, as he mentioned two things that are dear to me and that I was not expecting to hear from him:

- “Don’t talk about ideas, prototype and iterate, and do it fast!” That’s the hacker ethic for you.

- “We have to demand open carbon dioxide information” I couldn’t agree more.

Then we organized also a two days Green Hackathon. As it was part of a bigger event it was more of and ad-hoc-athon, where people could drop in for a while. I would say that it was not a very successful format, as it missed the working focus that makes hackathons productive. It was on the other hand great for creating new connections and we had very interesting workshops with the World Bank and the International Land Coalition.

My contribution from the Green Hackathon was HelsinkiCO2, a visualization of the carbon emissions from Helsinki, based on open data from Siemens and Aalto university. The idea is to allow to change different parameters dynamically to explore how different measures and different activities affect the results. You can see me explaining this at the Finnish Television (!).

Zapico, J. 2012. ICT and environmental sustainability: Friend or Foe? Information Technologies and International Development Vol 8, Issue 3, pp99-101

This text combines the review I wrote two years ago of Tomlinson’s Greening through IT with the review of  Robert Rattle’s Computing Our Way to Paradise?. These two books have quite different start points, while Tomlinson’s have a generally positive view of how ICT can help sustainability, Rattle reminds us of the problems with efficiency and rebound effects. This review analyses both vis-a-vis from the context of IC4D.

You can download the whole article, published open access under creative commons (BY, NC, SA)

One argument I always remember from Bill McKibben Deep Economy is this:

“Yale economist William Nordhaus [...] estimates ‘climate has little economic impact upon advanced industrial societies’ [...] the damage will be confined to farming and forestry, which represent only 3 percent of USA’s GNP [...] Science laboratories, communications, heavy manufacturing and microelectronics are among the sectors likely to be unaffected.”

To which McKibben answers:

“Well it’s true that not many of us make our living as farmers anymore [...]. But it’s also true that, first thing in the morning, before we go to work in the software design cubicle , most of us prefer to eat breakfast. It’s nice to have microelectronics, it’s necessary to have lunch. If global warming “only” damages agriculture, the rest may not matter much.”

I try to keep this in mind all the times when I get excited about the things that I do. The solutions we can provide from the ICT side (for instance the type of thinking we try to spark in the greenhackathon) can be part of the solution. But not any number of apps is going to create a sustainability society, as many times it’s seems to be message. My position in my research is that ICT does play a role in sustainability (as it play a growing role both in our everyday life and in the economic system), this can be either positive or negative. I try to understand better these impacts and the complex relationships, and I try to tip the balance for creating more positive impact and point out the negative ones to be improved. But again, it’s pretty sweet with internet, but I will choose a good dinner anytime. To gain perspective I leave my screen and I go to my garden and watch the vegetables grow.

Bill McKibben. 2007. Deep Economy. Pages 25-26

From a highrise in the city to a house in the countryside.

At the Centre for Sustainable Communications, and MID department where I work, teleworking and mediated communications have been a central part. One of the first ideas that come to mind when discussing ICT and sustainability is that with internet you can stay and work at home and skip daily commuting. The worker don’t have to travel, the rush hour get better and the company need less expensive real state, win-win right? But as with the paperless office, the promises haven’t been fulfilled yet. Even if there are a growing amount of teleworkers it feels like that the introduction of the computer just means that you take with your laptop home and to your holidays and are available and work also from home. But I do believe that teleworking and flexiworking in some way is feasible for many jobs and that it will be more accepted in the future. The repeated mantra of “work is something you do, not a place you go to” may feel tired, but it still provides an important message. For information workers as myself, what we do, what we produce, is the important thing. Being in an office at certain hours may be nice, but it’s the relevance for the production is unclear. Being a scholar (from the greek schole meaning leisure) is characterized by being able to organize your own time (meaning many times that we work too much), I like working at night for instance, and the flexibility of organizing my work as I want is beneficial for my results.

I’m a person of praxis, “action upon the world in order to transform it”. So right now I’m starting my own experiment in “radical teleworking”, radical in the meaning that it’s not just one day a week but most of the time, and that it’s from a distance that doesn’t allow me to just jump on the car and drop by the office to have a coffee. Me and my wife have moved from Stockholm, the capital in Sweden, to a house in the countryside of Ramkvilla where I will keep working on my research. This is in opposition to the general trend, the Swedish countryside is getting emptier while Stockholm and other urban clusters are receiving “busloads” of people everyday. That a garage place in the city centre is more expensive than a house in the countryside can be seen as a representation of this. So instead of investing on a garage, we invested in 1 acre of land with a red painted house, it felt better. This experiment will have positive sides, it will have its negative sides. I will be presenting here some of my experiences, how does it work with meetings, how does it work to collaborate with my colleagues, etc. Mention also that I’m pretty grateful for the support I’ve got from my colleagues and the management group at CESC and MID/KTH for allowing to do this kindof crazy thing.

This first week in any case have been very positive. I collaborated programming an application for The Guardian that was used in their Open Weekend, together with Daniel Schien and the Sympact team at Bristol University. I also had video meetings with Marko, my supervisor sitting in Finland and with my CESC colleagues in Stockholm. And I kept in touch with my parents in Spain and my sister in USA. All from the middle of the countryside, thanks to great swedish 3G network. This may feel natural now, yes, of course we can do that with internet. But it’s still revolutionary, it’s something impossible until very few years ago, and something that can change the way we can live. It embeds my believe that with IT we can live a sustainable lifestyle locally, while being part of the global community, using and contributing to the global knowledge. That I can go and get eggs from my neighbor and pick beets from my garden, while collaborating real time with researchers in other countries and being updated on the last developments of my field. Think global act local in practice.

While the project I’m leading is called data-driven sustainability, I’m a believer of the need of story-driven sustainability, the need of storytelling, visions and dreams. I’m helping my colleague Graham A with creating a book about radical visions of the future. The idea is to submit a text and an image or graphic that communicate possible bits of a sustainable futures. Not incremental solutions, but radical new approaches to society, nature, technology. The book will be published under creative commons license, and will be available electronically and physically. More info at http://manyfutures.net

Last weekend it was time for London Greenhackathon. This event was organized by the nice folks at AMEE and we were sponsors as EIT ICT Labs. We set up Greenhackathon as a replicable event, so people could organize their own in different places and use the same name and image. The London hackathon was the first one after the Stockholm one, and it was a success. London has a big community both of developers and of climate change, and this event brought together many of the people working on the connections of both, it was full of interesting people. I was happy to see the idea taking its own life.

There were sixteen projects presented, my personal favorite was one tonne, a site were you can budget one ton of co2 to different lifestyles choices.

Hannes and me developed Localista, a quite straight forward application where users can share were local food is available. The idea is to make food communities visible to make easier to eat locally. You can see the video of our presentation here.

During 18th of January 2012, many sites on internet, including wikipedia, shutdown in protest against the SOPA and PIPA legislations (+ info). Internet as we know it, looks as it does because many of the founding technologies were created by idealistic people sharing a hacker ethic, that believed that information should be free. Internet and the web is built on open technologies and transparency and that’s one of the reasons why it has allowed the innovation and changes that it has brought. This hacker ethic at the root of internet is challenged by governments with legislations as SOPA, PIPA or FRA in Sweden, trying to curtail freedom and privacy in the name of security, and by companies trying to own and profit from the technology by creating closed systems and taking your data. I believe that a sustainable internet is an internet that is true to the “hacker” values that created it, that values openness, freedom of speech, privacy. Closing Wikipedia for a day showed how we now depend on the tools that these values helped creating. We should help keeping them alive.

I organized together with Hannes the Greenhackathon that took place 21-22 October 2011 at the former reactor hall R1 at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. It was financed thanks to EIT ICT Labs. The idea of a hackathon is to get together groups of programmers and work for an extended period of time (in this case 24 hours straight) making things (in this case things related to sustainability). It is part competition, part of social event. The time limit seem short, but it actually provide a time of intense focus that usual office schedules don’t allow. The limit also helps focusing in getting things done and delivering a working prototype (think Tim Ferris  & Parkinson’s law). The event was a success, with around thirty participants coming from a variety of backgrounds and places. The quality of the results was great:

The two winner contributions were James Smith from England, who found an fun way of displaying carbon emissions in Minecraft, and Petri Kola and Mikko Heikkinen from Finland, who built a Chrome extension automatically ”injecting” CO2 data into websites. With their tool Remember Carbon, browsing last-minute-flights will not just be about the price but also about the climate impact.

My own contribution was the site Should I buy this? a “decision making tool” for consumers. I also worked with Sourcequest and did the graphic design and illustrations.

You can see the rest of the results here.

The location in the R1 reactor hall made a big difference. With a bare, post-industrial feeling, underground so not even mobile signals reached there, it was the perfect place for “hacking”. Also representative to make a event about sustainability in a refurbished nuclear reactor. From nuclear to sustainability, from heavy to virtual solutions.

In my opinion this event shows how the hacker ethic (understood in a general way as defined by Himanen) can contribute to sustainability, bringing the concepts of:

• Sharing, community and collaboration: sustainability is not going to be solve by anyone alone, share the results, work together. People work in teams, and a lot of cross-pollination happened between different teams and participants.
• Openness: information should be free. Most of the applications are based on open data and released as open source. Openness triggers innovation.
• Hands-On Imperative: doing things are necessary to understand and change things, move beyond just words. The teams created something functional in a limited amount of time.
• World Improvement: the main motivation of doing things is to improve the world, not commercial ones (but you can still make money “by accident”). The teams were motivated for creating a positive contribution.

A main problem, as my colleague Pargman wrote about, it’s a paradox to have a “green” event where people fly to participate. This is the same problem we have with sustainable conferences, research meetings and so on, and it’s a wicked one. You want to do things to change, but almost everything you do in our industrial society will have an impact in energy and resources. This is a discussion that I would like to develop later on. In any case, the 6.6 tons of CO2 are something not to ignore, and not something that anything that was created could offset. Some solutions may be to just organize local events, so developers can attend in their city, or virtual events to just participate globally. In any of the cases, there is loss of the social part and new connections made.

Now we are working towards replicating the event in other cities, starting with London and Helsinki, and thinking about the organization of the next one in Stockholm next year. If you are interested, follow us or post us a message!

Footprinted is the project I’ve been working on lately, this is the press release that Bernhard at CESC wrote:

Environmental impact information is difficult to access, thus missing much of its potential influence on sustainability decisions. It is time to apply the concept of open data to environmental information.

Sustainability decisions need to rely on the results of quantitative environmental research. Commonly, these results are found in closed, often expensive databases based on proprietary software. Alternatively, environmental information is presented in text documents (pdf-files) which cannot be processed.

- Environmental impact information should be accessible and easy to use. That’s why we have developed Footprinted.org, says Jorge Zapico from the KTH Centre for Sustainable Communication (CESC).

Footprinted is a web-based service applying the concept of open linked data to environmental impact information. In Footprinted, environmental research results are available free of charge. Data is stored in a format that can easily be processed to develop new services on top of the data. Everybody can create, present, share and reuse the environmental impact information. Different sources of research are presented in a transparent way. Unlike closed databases Footprinted does not apply a unique answer approach.

- It is a bazaar of environmental impact information, rather than a cathedral, explains Jorge Zapico.

In its current version, Footprinted provides a repository of life cycle assessments of different materials, products and processes. The next step in Footprinted’s development is to include the footprints of individual consumer products.

Footprinted is the result of a design research process within the project Data Driven Sustainability and is currently available in beta version at www.footprinted.org. Footprinted is a collaboration between the KTH Centre for Sustainable Communications, Sourcemap Inc and MIT Media Lab. Footprinted is to be presented on 6 October 2011 at the EnviroInfo Conference in Ispra/Italy.