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To ensure that more people will benefit from integrated care initiatives, scaling-up of successful initiatives is the way forward. However, new challenges present themselves as knowledge on how to achieve successful large-scale implementation is scarce. The EU-funded project SCIROCCO uses a step-based scaling-up strategy to explore what to scale-up, and how to scale-up integrated care initiatives by matching the complementary strengths and weaknesses of five European regions involved in integrated care. The purpose of this paper is to describe a multi-method evaluation protocol designed to understand what factors influence the implementation of the SCIROCCO strategy to support the scaling-up of integrated care.

The first part of the protocol focuses on the assessment of the implementation fidelity of the SCIROCCO step-based strategy. The objective is to gain insight in whether the step-based strategy is implemented as it was designed to explore what works and does not work when implementing the scaling-up strategy. The second part concerns a realist evaluation to examine what it is about the SCIROCCO’s strategy that works for whom, why, how and in which circumstances when scaling-up integrated care.

The intended study will provide valuable information on the implementation of the scaling-up strategy which will help to explain for what specific reasons the implementation succeeds and will facilitate further improvement of project outcomes.

The expected insights could be useful to guide the development, implementation and evaluation of future scaling-up strategies to advance the change towards more sustainable health and care systems.

The purpose of this article is to provide a commentary to the conceptual article by Norberto Patrignani and Diane Whitehouse, The Clean Side of Slow Tech. This article explores what can be easily overlooked in Information Communication Technology (ICT): the uncomfortable truth relating to the production, use and disposal of modern communication technology.

In it, the author picks up on the main ideas that were argued, specifically that there is a need to take a closer look at the production, use and disposal of modern communication technology.

Connecting resource production, use and disposal and its affect on climate change will require those who are in the position to make changes to come up with solutions that also consider values, beliefs and norms that lead to particular types of behaviour.

ICT has had an enormous impact on people’s lives. However, there has been primarily focus on its life-accelerating attributes. Slowing down the process of production may open up possibilities for sustainable ICT development.

The commentary, combined with Patrignani and Whitehouse’s paper may provide a resource for those responsible in training future ICT professionals.

If today’s society, and this includes users and producers of ICT, intends to go beyond the mere rhetoric about sustainability, individuals will need to take on a new kind of responsibility that covers the entire life cycle of technology.

This commentary is intended to provide an additional viewpoint to the topic of sustainable ICT production.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Slow Tech can support the celebration of the 20-year series of ETHICOMP conferences, with its ethical and societal focus, building on earlier descriptions of Slow Tech. The paper takes Slow Tech’s ideas a step further to explore how a roadmap and concrete checklist of activities can be developed.

The paper is a thought leadership or conceptual piece. Its approach is based on a normative, qualitative discourse. It, nevertheless, indicates a shift towards concrete actions.

Extracting from a brief historical overview, the paper lays out the means of building a Slow Tech roadmap and a Slow Tech checklist of actions. It also investigates a number of the challenges that might face Slow Tech in the future.

The paper has implications for stakeholder fields as far-ranging as corporations, computing professional associations, universities and research institutions and end-users.

As with other investigations of Slow Tech, the value of this paper is in its call for reflection followed by action. It provides a useful complement and counterbalance to an earlier paper by the same authors: “Slow Tech: a quest for good, clean and fair ICT” published in Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society (Vol. 12, issue 2, pp. 78-92).

This paper aims to provide an overview of clean information and communication technology (ICT), including a brief review of recent developments in the field and a lengthy set of possible reading matter. The need to rethink the impact of ICTs on people’s lives and the survival of the planet is beginning to be addressed by a Slow Tech approach. Among Slow Tech’s main questions are these two: Is ICT sustainable in the long term? What should be done by computer ethics scholars, computer professionals, policy makers and society in general to ensure that clean ICT can be produced, used and appropriately disposed of?

The paper is based on a comprehensive review of clean tech-related literature and an investigation of progress made in the clean tech field.

This opening paper of a Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society special session aims to provide an overview of clean ICT, including a brief review of recent developments in the field and a lengthy set of possible reading matter. As a result, it is anticipated that Slow Tech – and in this case, its second component of clean ICT – can provide a compass to steer research, development and the use and reuse of environmentally friendly, sustainable ICT.

This conceptual paper emphasises that, until only recently, no one questioned the potential long-term sustainability of ICT. This issue is, however, now very much a matter that is on the research and teaching, and action, agenda.

This discussion paper focuses on a notion of information and communication technology (ICT) that is good, clean and fair that the authors call Slow Tech. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the Slow Tech approach in order to explain how to create a suitable bridge between business ethics and computer ethics.

The paper’s approach is discursive. It provides a viewpoint. Its arguments are based in an examination of literature relevant to both business ethics and computer ethics. Justification is produced for the use of Slow Tech approach. A number of potential future research and application issues still to be investigated are also provided.

Slow Tech can be proposed, and used, as a bridging mechanism between companies’ strategies regarding computer ethics and business ethics. Three case studies illustrate the kind of challenges that companies have to tackle when trying to implement Slow Tech in concrete business context. Further study need to be undertaken to make progress on Slow Tech in applied, corporate settings.

ICT companies need to look for innovative, new approaches to producing, selling and recycling their services and products. A Slow Tech approach can provide such insights.

Today’s challenges to the production and use of good, clean, and fair ICT, both conceptual and concrete, can act as incentives for action: they can further applied research or encourage social activism. Encouraging the study, and the application, of Slow Tech provides a first step in the potential improvement of a society in which information technology is totally embedded.

The value of this paper in not only for academics and researchers, but also for practitioners: especially for personnel working in ICT companies and for those involved with designing, developing and applying codes of conduct at both European and globally.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the role of information and communication technology (ICT) for promoting environmental sustainability in a changing society. Isolated studies exist, but few take a holistic view. Derived from a Marxian tradition, the authors propose Ecological World Systems Theory (WST) as a holistic framework to assess the environmental impact of ICT. The theory is adapted responding to theoretical critiques of absence of change, namely state-centrism and structuralism.

Theoretical study. Empirical examples derived from already published literature.

Ecological WST focuses on the unequal distribution of environmental degradation, sees technological development as a zero-sum game rather than cornucopia and holds that technology is often seen as a fetish in today ' s society. The findings are that popular discourses on ICT and sustainability are since the 1990s becoming increasingly cornucopian, while conditions in the ICT value chain are less cornucopian.

Theoretical contributions to Marxian critiques of ICT, with more environmental focus than earlier Marxian critiques, for example Fuchs’ work. Develop a theoretical framework for ICT and sustainability which could be compared with works of e.g. Hilty, Patrignani and Whitehouse. The work is mostly based on existing empirical studies, which is a limitation.

This theoretical framework implies that unequal environmental degradation in different parts of the world should be taken into account when assessing environmental impact, for example by means of LCA.

The framework brings together questions of environmental effects of ICT and global justice.

The authors apply a rarely discussed theoretical framework to ICT and environmental sustainability. By doing this the authors suggest how the discourses and the value chain of ICT is intrinsically tied to the world system.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the term Slow Tech as a way of describing information and communication technology (ICT) that is good, clean and fair. These are technologies that are human centred, environmentally sustainable and socially desirable.

The paper's approach is based on a qualitative discourse that justifies the introduction of Slow Tech as a new design paradigm.

The limits of the human body, and the need to take into account human wellbeing, the limits of the planet and stakeholders' interests in decision making, all suggest the need for a new paradigm, Slow Tech, in the design of ICT and ICT systems. Three scenarios are described as case studies.

In order to prepare the next generation of researchers and computer professionals, many different actions need to be taken. Universities and colleges need to redesign education programmes for computer scientists and engineers by introducing subjects related to the social and ethical implications of computing (currently, only few countries, like the UK, have already done this), and computer professionals' associations need to introduce a code of ethics or ethical analysis into their members' career development. As a result, future computer professionals who are familiar with the Slow Tech approach will be able to collaborate much more easily across the kind of cross disciplinary teams suited to design human centred, sustainable and desirable technologies.

Rather than simply focusing on the role of computer professionals, all members of society are called to play a new role in the design of future ICT scenarios. Starting a societal dialogue that involves computer professionals, users, researchers, designers, ICT industrialists, and policy makers is very much needed.

The value of this paper is in its call for reflection followed by action. Based on an holistic approach to the design of new ICT systems, the paper advocates a new starting point for systems design: it should be based on a long-term view of the desirability and social importance of technologies, their environmental impact and sustainability, and the fairness and equity of the conditions of workers involved in the computing manufacturing processes.