The manifesto

A. What we do and why we do it

  1. We create software to enable sustainable development in Sardinia because we believe technology has a role to play in address societal and environmental challenges.
  2. We use the techniques of data science to improve the understanding of Sardinian environment, economics, and society because we think successful development can only come from good understanding.
  3. We work in the field of computational sustainability, because we believe technology is going to have an important role in the solution of the problems of our society and our environment, towards a sustainable future.
  4. We open our work and resources to all disciplines because we think only by carrying out interdisciplinary work we can address the challenges of sustainable development.
  5. We empower local communities in Sardinia through our work, because we think that development can be sustainable only if supported by local communities from within.
  6. We work for the Sardinian community and only for it because we want to keep our efforts focused.
  7. To make sure our efforts are focused on our aims, we attain to the following definition: sustainable development is development that
    • replaces any resources (natural and human-made) with resources of equal or greater value,
    • does not compromise one type of resource for another,
    • can be maintained indefinitely,
    • does not require state aid for its maintenance,
    • provides full-time jobs to people in the community,
    • keeps any financial revenue within the community.
  8. We support other organisations and initiatives that align with what we do because our success depends on their success too.
  9. We inform institutions, to make sure they have accurate data to take the best decisions.
  10. We inform the public to make sure they are aware of our efforts and they’re aware of what is happening in the community and environment. To do this, we use clear, simple language.
  11. We attain to high technical standards because we want to make sure what we do can be both used and maintained as easily as possible.
  12. We produce rigorous work because we want it to matter. We want our impact to be as high as possible.
  13. We believe culture is a form of human-made resource, and we want to add value to Sardinian culture by using and increasing the prestige of Sardinian languages. For this reason:
    • we use English and any local Sardinian language for internal written communication,
    • we use English, any local Sardinian language, and Italian for external written communication,
    • we use any local Sardinian language as much as possible for all communication,
    • for “Sardinian local language” we mean anyone of the following: Sardinian (either in the Logudorese or Campidanese varieties), Catalan, Gallurese, Sassarese, or Tabarkin. The only important thing is that the text is written correctly, according to published orthographic rules.
  14. We aim to be a blueprint for other initiatives in the world because the consequences of non-sustainable development, environmental degradation in particular, affect all the communities in the world.
  15. We accept any contribution from anybody so long as we don’t have to compromise with the contents of this Manifesto. This is because we need to get all the help we can to achieve our aims.

B. What we don’t do and why we don’t do it

  1. We don’t do any work that doesn’t involve computing or data analysis at all, because we want to focus our efforts.
  2. We don’t carry out work under request for specific companies because we’re not a company ourselves.
  3. We don’t produce closed-source software because we want our work to be useful to as many people as possible. However, we can use non-open-source software as we see fit.
  4. The initiative does not affiliate with political parties because we don’t want doubts to be cast on the rigour of our work.
  5. We do not develop military applications.
  6. We do not work on anything that supports any form of perpetual state aid (assistenzialismo) because we don’t think that is sustainable development.
  7. We don’t develop anything that supports non-sustainable development in any of its forms.

C. Our values

The following are the values we apply to everything we do within the initiative.

Reason

We are guided by reason. We justify what we do with rigorous arguments to the best of our abilities. We want to be objective and we do not allow our work to be affected by our personal convictions.

Empathy

We empathise with the people we interact with. We provide constructive feedback in a respectful way because the whole initiative benefits from the personal growth and the learning of each participant. We recognise and cherish contribution.

Selflessness

We do not aim to achieve political or economic benefit from our work within the initiative.