Thoughts on sustainability
Over the last 7 years at least some part of my professional work has involved dealing with the issue of ‘sustainability’ in music technology. This has largely centred on the question of making musical works with live electronics more sustainable, for instance, by storing data in an application-neutral format or developing software versions of legacy hardware systems.
However, now I’m coming to the end of a six year research project, which has sustainability at its core, I’m starting to question whether we have achieved our sustainability goals…
What is sustainability?
The first thing we need to acknowledge is that this is a sliding scale. It’s not a question of whether something is sustainable or not, but rather how sustainable. Whilst I previously viewed this as a purely technical matter (e.g. binary file formats are less sustainable than text-based formats), I’m starting to look at the problem along a number of separate dimensions, namely: openness, funding and acceptance. A truly sustainable project needs all three.
Openness can be achieved through open licensing and the use of open standards. Funding can potentially be gained through academic or public research funding as well as commercialisation.
Possibly the most important, but also difficult aspect of sustainability to fulfil is ‘acceptance’. In order to be sustainable, software, protocols and standards need to be accepted by communities that use them. Without a community of users, contributors, supporters and developers who ‘accept’ it, a project ultimately becomes redundant.
