RE@21: Time to Sustain!

The requirements engineering (RE) conference is turning 21, our conference is “grown up” now. We take this as a motivation to rethink our responsibility for this conference, and to prepare the path for sustainable RE conferences for future generations. Although sustainability has been broached as conference topic in RE’08, hardly any long-lasting consequences followed. We consider this as vital for improving the research community experience while minimizing especially the environmental impact of the conference. We contribute a model for improving the sustainability of the RE conference by systematically analysing the different dimensions of sustainability and their corresponding impact with regards to this conference. On that basis we define actions that improve a specific aspect of sustainability and describe how the actions are implemented at RE’13 in Rı́o. Our envisioned long-term impact for the conference is that by providing a hands-on case study every conference participant can actively support, this paper can lay the foundation for a sustainability guideline for further improving the sustainability of the RE conference series. Keywords-requirements engineering; sustainability; generic model; case study; conference organization;