Review: The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience By Rob Hopkins Reviewed by Alex Alkhoury University of Western Ontario, Canada Hopkins, Rob. The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008. 240 pp. ISBN: 9781900322188. US$24.95, paper. Chlorine-free recycled paper. The intertwined emergencies of peak oil and climate change demand dramatic, urgent action across a range of scales, the magnitude of which can threaten to overwhelm people, particularly those who are just learning about these issues. When problems seem overwhelming it can easily lead to individual inaction and collective inertia, and this is precisely what Rob Hopkins seeks to overcome in The Transition Handbook. His essential goal is to outline a realistic and hopeful vision of post-carbon communities and the practical steps needed to get there. The starting point for Transition is the essential problem now widely understood as ‘peak oil’: as the production of conventional oil declines, its growing scarcity will drive increasingly higher fuel prices with profound implications for industrial economies. Hopkins argues that while climate change exists in the public consciousness as an intangible or, at most, distant fear, the decline of cheap fossil energy is a much more proximate and understandable problem for many – as barrels of oil are easier to visualize than tonnes of [greenhouse] gas (p.40) – and can thus simultaneously spark necessary action on both issues. Hopkins begins by succinctly describing the nature of the problems (what he calls ‘The Head’), then appeals for a rational, composed response (in a section called the 'The Heart'), before digging into the crux of the book, ‘The Hands,’ a discussion of specific, transitional steps and strategies to move beyond economies centred on fossil energy. His 'Twelve Steps of Transition' are underpinned by a clear statement of six core principles, including positive 'visioning', 'inclusion' of all members of the community, 'awareness-raising', 'resilience', using 'psychological insights' to counter the threat of inaction, and focusing on the community level to attain 'credible and appropriate solutions'. For Hopkins, a community's resilience hinges on its ability to produce core goods and services, while only importing what cannot be sourced locally. Building momentum for re-localization depends upon first building a strong foundation of community-level understanding of the issues and rebuilding connections among people. Hopkins provides great, practical detail here, outlining strategies on running successful public meetings, and providing tips on organizing things like empowering re- skilling group events, and how best to obtain publicity for both these and also the launch of a given Transition Initiative. In this, Transition also doubles as a best practices guide for the logistical elements of community organization and activism. This practical and optimistic ‘how to’ dimension is undoubtedly the book’s great objective and strength, and for this it should appeal to those eager to inspire action in their own communities. However, it is not Hopkins' intention to provide a precise, universal plan, but rather a general set of guidelines backed by motivating examples of contemporary re-localization efforts. At times, this does leave difficult questions of scale underdeveloped, with much of the discussion directed at the level of relatively small communities. With a background in permaculture and as the founder of the UK Transition movement, Hopkins is well-positioned to offer both a broader vision and a practical plan for re-localization and self-reliance. His achievement in this book is to give concrete grounds for optimism in a captivating and highly accessible way. In this, it is a particularly useful antidote to those who are concerned but overwhelmed, as well as being a useful starting point into peak oil and transition issues for progressive scholars, students, activists and the general public alike. Alex Alkhoury. , MA Student, Department of Geography, University of Western Ontario, Social Science Centre, London, Ontario N6A 5C2, Canada. Electronic Green Journal, Issue 29, Winter 2009, ISSN:1076-7975

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Review: The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience

This introductory chapter provides definitions of sustainability, sustainable development, decoupling, and related terms; gives an overview of existing interdisciplinary research fields related to ICT for Sustainability, including Environmental Informatics, Computational Sustainability, Sustainable HCI, and Green ICT; introduces a conceptual framework to structure the effects of ICT on sustainability; and provides an overview of this book.

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ICT for Sustainability: An Emerging Research Field

This article aims to investigate the Grand Challenges which arise in the current and emerging landscape of rapid technological evolution towards more intelligent interactive technologies, coupled w...

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Seven HCI Grand Challenges

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

The ability to predict student performance in a course or program creates opportunities to improve educational outcomes. With effective performance prediction approaches, instructors can allocate resources and instruction more accurately. Research in this area seeks to identify features that can be used to make predictions, to identify algorithms that can improve predictions, and to quantify aspects of student performance. Moreover, research in predicting student performance seeks to determine interrelated features and to identify the underlying reasons why certain features work better than others. This working group report presents a systematic literature review of work in the area of predicting student performance. Our analysis shows a clearly increasing amount of research in this area, as well as an increasing variety of techniques used. At the same time, the review uncovered a number of issues with research quality that drives a need for the community to provide more detailed reporting of methods and results and to increase efforts to validate and replicate work.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3293881.3295783

Predicting academic performance: a systematic literature review

Many software systems today control large-scale sociotechnical systems. These systems aren't just entangled with the environment but also with our dwindling resources and mostly unsustainable way of living, while the planet's population continues to grow. Dealing with sustainability requirements and systematically supporting their elicitation, analysis, and realization is a problem that has yet to be solved. Decades ago, the discipline of software engineering dealt with similar shortcomings in its processes by including safety and security as new system qualities. In light of the increasing consequences of inadequately addressing sustainability in developing software systems, software engineers must apply the lessons learned from these prior research efforts and identify the necessary research agenda. Considering sustainability in software engineering means more than energy efficiency and green IT, which are concerned with the first-order impacts of software systems. Software engineers must also take into account the second- and third-order impacts in the system context, even if they're hard to assess. By doing so, engineers have the potential to considerably improve civilization's sustainability. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/VC07j6a1XUw is a video in which author Birgit Penzenstadler talks about how software engineers can considerably improve civilization's sustainability by taking into account not just the first-order impacts of software systems but also their second- and third-order impacts.

Safety, Security, Now Sustainability: The Nonfunctional Requirement for the 21st Century

Background/Context: The objective of achieving higher sustainability in our lifestyles by information and communication technology has lead to a plethora of research activities in related fields. Consequently, Software Engineering for Sustainability (SE4S) has developed as an active area of research. Objective/Aim: Though SE4S gained much attention over the past few years and has resulted in a number of contributions, there is only one rigorous survey of the field. We follow up on this systematic mapping study from 2012 with a more in-depth overview of the status of research, as most work has been conducted in the last 4 years. Method: The applied method is a systematic mapping study through which we investigate which contributions were made, which knowledge areas are most explored, and which research type facets have been used, to distill a common understanding of the state-of-the-art in SE4S. Results: We contribute an overview of current research topics and trends, and their distribution according to the research type facet and the application domains. Furthermore, we aggregate the topics into clusters and list proposed and used methods, frameworks, and tools. Conclusion: The research map shows that impact currently is limited to few knowledge areas and there is need for a future roadmap to fill the gaps.

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Systematic mapping study on software engineering for sustainability (SE4S)

Requirements engineers are in a unique position to encourage the consideration of sustainability at a formative phase in the software development life cycle. In this paper, we look at how we can develop sustainability as a non-functional requirement (NFR). We describe an NFR framework that is informed by sustainability models and discuss how it can be used to appropriately elicit and describe sustainability related requirements of the software system to be developed. We outline a roadmap for how we may integrate sustain- ability in requirements engineering from a theoretical NFR framework to an applicable software quality and relevant software standards.

Developing a sustainability non-functional requirements framework

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A grand challenge for HCI: food + sustainability

There is significant interest in designing technologies for the food system, from agricultural modeling tools to apps enabling humans to assess nutritional value of various food choices to drones for pest detection. However, a good food system must be a sustainable one. There is an urgent need for deliberation and thoughtfulness in designing for both technologies that support existing food systems and new modalities that work towards more sustainable food systems. This workshop will bring together HCI researchers, designers, and practitioners with an interest in exploring what constitutes a sustainable food system, as well as defining the role of HCI in this domain. Our key objectives for this workshop will be to identify what opportunities for design and collaboration exist and to lay the foundation for an active foodCHI community.

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Ankita Raturi

Papers

Safety, Security, Now Sustainability: The Nonfunctional Requirement for the 21st Century

Systematic mapping study on software engineering for sustainability (SE4S)

Developing a sustainability non-functional requirements framework

A grand challenge for HCI: food + sustainability

Designing Sustainable Food Systems