Community memories for sustainable societies

To be published on the occasion of the 20th Anniversary of Sony CSL, Tokyo spring 2008.Our species stands before the unprecedented challenge to fundamentally change its ways in order to avoid the potential catastrophe that would make our world inhabitable and the dangerous tensions that inevitably arise when food, energy and other resources become scarce. This paper raises the question what computer science can contribute to help foster this change. It focuses on community memories. These are distributed web-based information systems that help to raise awareness for the need of action and organise collective effort towards the fair and sustainable management of a commons. Three upcoming technologies are discussed for creating community memories: high performance volunteer computing, participatory mobile sensing, and social tagging.N