Modeling Social Inclusion Systems

Abstract

Research on sustainability science has been concerned with pointing the way towards a sustainable society. On a global scale, sustainability is seen as depending on three systems: the global system, the human system and the social system. In the social system, the need to address issues of social sustainability, including literacy, education, malnutrition, child mortality, and gender empowerment, as well as its connections with human and global sustainability, has given rise to the eight Millennium Development Goals, which break down into twenty one quantifiable targets that are measured by sixty indicators. Therefore, it is clear that the problems and issues associated with the achievement of these goals are very complex to be addressed by a single discipline and that community informatics (CI) may have an important role to play in interdisciplinary efforts to address these goals. Against this backdrop, one of the first challenges is to put the notion of a social inclusion system (a system to promote social sustainability) in more precise terms. In this direction, the purpose of this paper is to discuss and present an initial ontology to describe social inclusion systems. While ontological development in sustainability science has emphasized a problem-solution approach, we believe that the issues of social inclusion will be more naturally addressed by a situation-transformation approach, which is the focus of our ontology.