Our intent is to create a lively, interactive discussion, to foster brainstorming and community building. Registration will be open to all. There will be no formal publication of proceedings. Instead, we strongly encourage participants to submit (one or more) brief (1-page) responses to the challenge statement, either as:

• Descriptions of existing research projects relevant to the challenge statement (preferably with pointers to published papers and/or online resources);
• Position papers outlining potential research projects.
  

Be creative and forward-thinking in these proposals: think of the future, and think big!

We will circulate all submitted papers to participants in advance of the workshop, via this website, and invite participants to revise/update/embellish their contributions in response to everyone else's contributions. Our plan is to write a post-workshop report, which will draw on both the submitted papers and the discussions during the workshop. This report will lay out a suggested agenda for both short-term and long-term research in response to the challenge, and act as a roadmap for subsequent workshops and funding proposals.

Inquiries and submissions should be sent to the workshop chair, Steve Easterbrook.

Position paper submission deadline: 2 April 2010

For discussions about this workshop and related initiatives, please visit the Google group SE-for-the-planet.

The workshop will begin with one or two keynote talks, chosen to frame the challenge problem, and suggest possible software engineering research directions in response to it. The remainder of the day will consist of structured brainstorming sessions, based around an analysis of the intellectual assets and research strengths of the ICSE research community, and a set of areas of need derived from the challenge statement. The position papers submitted to the workshop will also be used to seed these sessions. We will use breakout groups to allow participants to flesh out specific responses to the challenge, to be presented back to the workshop in a closing plenary session.

We welcome the active participation of software researchers and practitioners interested in any aspect of this challenge. The participants will themselves determine the scope and thrusts of this workshop, so this list of suggested topics is intended to act only as a starting point:

• requirements analysis for complex global change problems;
• integrating sustainability into software system design;
• green IT, including power-aware computing and automated energy management;
• developing control systems to create smart energy grids and improve energy conservation;
• developing information systems to support urban planning, transport policies, green buildings, etc.;
• software tools for open collaborative science, especially across scientific disciplines;
• design patterns for successful emissions reduction strategies;
• social networking tools to support rapid action and knowledge sharing among communities;
• educational software for hands-on computational science;
• knowledge management and decision support tools for designing and implementing climate change policies;
• tools and techniques to accelerate the development and validation of earth system models by climate scientists;
• data sharing and data management of large scientific datasets;
• tools for creating and sharing visualizations of climate change data;