Attention: wild speculation and provocative operations below.
Steve and I met last week and discussed a rather intruiging, and far out topic: the relationship between software design and global climate policy design. I'll lay it out rather straightforwardly and unconditionally:
Software systems are some of the most complex systems that humans design. Taking a global view, the world's climate policies also form a complex system of human design. Are there any design or process techniques from software engineering that can be applied to climate policy design?
(In short, just "s/software/climate policy/g" and see what makes sense.)
It doesn't seem like climate policy is built nearly as deliberately or methodically as software often is. You might say that it's "hacked". Can insight from software development processes be used to guide the process of planetary climate policy development?
Software designers use an architecture to cope with the complexity of large software systems (btw, is this a form of chunking?). Climate policy (policy in general?) lacks this sort of architecture (or maybe lacks a good one?). What can we use from the design of software architectures to help us design good climate policy? Are there design patterns in effective climate policy that match up with the software engineer's idea of software design patterns?
You can run the analogy along all the different aspects of software engineering: requirements engineering, design, testing, quality, development process, etc...
Does the analogy work? Also, can we go the other way around and import useful concepts from the way climate policy is designed into software engineering? Ugh.. ;-)
I suppose what we're doing here is applying systems engineering thinking to climate policy design by way of our knowledge of software engineering (as one type of systems engineering).
By the way, Steve has just blogged a much more coherent statement of how software engineering can play a role in fighting climate change.
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