Searching for sustainability in the digital agriculture debate: an alternative approach for a systemic transition

One of the key challenges for agriculture today is feeding an increasing population without contributing to climate change. Increasingly, digital agriculture is discussed as a new sociotechnical regime that could help limit emissions for farmers worldwide. While sustainability is an important issue, recent papers in the field of digital agriculture do not address the problem directly. After a literature review, this paper will focus on the importance of shared perspectives as enablers in socio-technical transitions. This paper argues that the myth of the digital sublime could act in favour of the existing and unsustainable model of agriculture. This is partly a result of hardware production and connectivity already being resource-intensive. Precisely because of this high environmental impact, the following discussion will employ the legacy of the Green Revolution to highlight the importance of precaution in deploying digital agriculture. In theory, in order to address the shortcomings of the current system, private sector companies are developing proprietary software solutions that could in practice entrench unsustainable business models. As an alternative, this paper suggests, existing open-source platforms that encourage not-for-profit collaborations between farmers should be scaled up. Through bottom-up processes, future researchers and developers should seek ways to place sustainability at the centre of their analyses, and encourage the adoption of practices that can be tailored to the diverse needs of farmers. Ultimately, stakeholders in digital agriculture should understand that sustainability principles must be encoded at all stages in the deployment of digital agriculture technologies.

Affordable telecommunications

The unparalleled success of mobile technologies, the emergence of new modes of software and hardware production, and the free circulation of shared knowledge in the Web 2.0 have enabled a new generation of bottom-up, community-based, cost-effective telecommunications initiatives and projects. While these endeavours find their roots in previous hobbyists’ movements (i.e. amateur radio, software hackers, do-it-yourself communities) today's’ initiatives are able to connect, co-produce and share knowledge with world-wide communities, engaging new participants both at the local and the global level. This article reviews recent developments that aim to provide free or low-cost access to telecommunication services in different areas. From Do-It-Yourself (DIY) satellites to mesh networks, these projects tap into the wisdom and resources of communities to offer non-commercial alternatives to present telecommunications services. The technology, organisational, and regulatory challenges they also face cannot be underestimated either. However, in their struggle to find and consolidate new markets, affordable telecommunications reveal that a new digital economy based on co-production could be under way.

30 EARS ANNIVERSARY OF BELARUSSIAN METALCORD

The article describes the history of the formation and development of metal cord production in Belarus. The main ways of the Belarusian metallurgical works had followed from the production of the first tons of steel wire cord, before reaching the production capacity, twofold of the design capacity. The authors paid a lot of attention to the structure of hardware production, which is the visiting card of the plant today, to people who directly participated and promote the process of new products manufacture. Particular attention in the article is devoted to the geography of deliveries of metal cord and the main customers – consumers who use this product in the production of tires. The changes in the properties of the steel wire cord from the moment of first manufacture to the present time is traced, based on permanent changes of the requirements of the automotive industry.

IS THERE MORE OR LESS COMPATIBILITY BETWEEN SYSTEMS WHEN CONSUMERS ARE KEENER ON A RIVAL SYSTEM’S SOFTWARE?

A greater level of keenness on a rival system’s software intuitively motivates system manufacturers to raise their degrees of compatibility in order to capture more profit from selling software to rival system users. After constructing a game-theoretic model to investigate system manufacturers’ partial compatibility decisions, this paper surprisingly finds that when consumers are keener on a rival system’s software, hardware price competition is relaxed and system manufacturers reduce the degrees of compatibility. This paper also presents the following three results. First, partial compatibility occurs when the expenditure on system goods is relatively low. Second, the optimal degree of compatibility increases in the expenditure on system goods and decreases in hardware production cost. Third, system manufactures suffer losses on selling hardware when keenness on a rival system’s software is relatively low. According to Lee (2013), this result provides a theoretical interpretation of the phenomenon that platform providers often sell hardware platforms close or below cost in the US video game industry [Lee, R (2013). Vertical integration and exclusively platform and two-sided markets. American Economic Review, 103, 2960–3000].