CS2013-final-report

Additional topics
The sustainability of technical solutions within a social context is missing from the current draft of the CS Curricula
2013.
Therefore additional significant topics worth mentioning include:
• Being a sustainable practitioner by taking into consideration cultural and environmental impacts of
implementation decisions (e.g., organizational policies, economic viability, and resource consumption).
• How the sustainability of software systems are interdependent with social systems, including the
knowledge and skills of its users, organizational processes and policies, and its societal context (e.g.,
market forces, government policies).
• Plan sustainability into projects by accounting for the social context in which the software application will
be embedded and deliberately building the capacity to sustain it.
Other comments
This course has been enhanced by the collaboration and teaching of Scott McElfresh who co-taught and taught the
course at a few times at Carnegie Mellon. It has been replicated by Steven Andrianoff at St. Bonaventure. It has
also inspired a similar course at the University of Alaska in Anchorage where Alex Hills uses the same consulting
philosophy and consulting steps and has used and adapted some of my original materials.
Finally, the same approach is embodied in a summer program called Technology Consulting in the Global
Community that places students in a 10-week summer consulting assignment with a government ministry, nonprofit
organization, school, or small business in a developing country.
(See http://cmu.edu/tcingc)
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