Software for Organisational Responsibility
Responsible organisations behave in compliance with ethical values, and strive to maximise their positive impact and minimise their negative impact on society and on the environment. They face challenges such as assessing their business ethics and their social and environmental performance, integrating that information into their decision making, enacting continuous improvement processes that make them increasingly responsible, thriving in economic ecosystems where not every other company shares their values, communicating transparently with other enterprises, governments and citizens, facilitating responsible consumerism, etc.
In the Software for Organisational Responsibility Lab, research the role of software within this domain, and we design conceptual frameworks, methods and software products that help responsible organisations achieve their goals. We also research the challenges faced by the ICT industry in dealing with ethical, social and environmental topics. We mainly adopt a model driven engineering approach, in which models play a primary role in understanding an analysing the topics, as well as in configuring software products in a way that they are tailored to the characteristics and context of the responsible organisations.
We have the privilege of partnering and collaborating with social enterprises, non-governmental organisations, foundations, networks of responsible companies, etc. While this research lab aims at contributing new knowledge (e.g. theories, conceptual frameworks, methods) to the scientific community, valorisation and industrial applicability is of utmost importance if we are to make a positive impact in the world.
The image below overviews the continuous improvement cycle for organisational responsibility, the model-driven and ontology-based approach for software production in this domain, and some of the open-source software tools we are developing.
