Global Software Engineering in the Age of GitHub and Zoom
It identifies critical responsibilities for developers and academics in managing software's societal impact, though it is incremental in building on existing awareness.
The paper addresses the evolving challenges in global software engineering, highlighting the need to incorporate ethics and mitigate harmful unintended consequences in societal-scale systems like social media, but does not report specific results or numbers.
Much has changed since the inaugural ICGSE conference in 2006. Tools have improved, awareness of cultural differences is widespread, and developments such as the foregrounding of open source have all enhanced our ability to work across geographic divides. But the pervasive and profound impact of software in the world -- especially for societal scale systems such as social media -- forces new and deeply challenging responsibilities on both developers and academics. We must find better ways of incorporating ethics into our development practices and pay far more attention to harmful unintended consequences as deployed systems interact with and often disrupt crucial social systems.