Software Source Code for Sustainable Development

The themes which will be discussed during this Expert Meeting, co-organized with INRIA, are:
1. Software as both cultural heritage and business vehicle
2. Software to enhance education and science
3. Legal and ethical implications
4. Policy making and advocacy

This event will seek to achieve the following three results:

1. Highlight the importance of preserving software in general, and software source code in particular as important levers of sustainable development; identify the resources needed to support software preservation in terms of infrastructural development as well as an enabling policy and legal framework for long-term software preservation.

2. Produce a conceptual framework for promoting software development as a serious field for applied and academic research, given the fact that software development is increasingly becoming an essential part of all research activities in all fields, from 'hard' to 'soft' sciences, including in the humanities.

3. Suggest means to develop a Global Software Registry, which will help all stakeholders to recognize and enable software reuse as an important part of all modern software developments by providing a universal catalogue that will index all available software components, with the metadata needed to properly locate and reuse them.