Citizen Engineer: A Handbook for Socially Responsible Engineering

This new SMI Press book, authored by Sun's Dave Douglas, Greg Papadopoulos and John Boutelle, is titled Citizen Engineer and early Rough Cut access is available to Sun employees via Safari Books Online. (Sun employees here | Non Sun employees purchase here)

Here is a summary of the book:

Being an engineer today means being far more than an engineer. You need to consider not only the design requirements of your projects but the full impact of your work--from an ecological perspective, an intellectual property perspective, a business perspective, and a sociological perspective. And you must coordinate your efforts with many other engineers, sometimes hundreds of them. In short, we've entered an age that demands socially responsible engineering on a whole new scale. The era of the Citizen Engineer.

This engaging and thought-provoking book focuses on two topics that are becoming vitally important in the day-to-day work of engineers today: eco engineering and intellectual property (IP). The book also examines how and why the world of engineering has changed and provides practical advice to help engineers of all types master the new era of engineering and start thinking like Citizen Engineers.

This access is prior to the print version of the book coming out in June 2009. Sun employees will be able to purchase a print copy at a 40% discount towards the end of April but anyone can purchase at www.sun.com/books when it's published.

For Sun employees: you can download specific chapters for offline reading and even access those downloaded chapters via your iPhone or iPod Touch (see blog on Safari Bookbag application)

Since this is a Rough Cut (pre-published access to book content), you can choose to receive an email alert when the final version is available as well as make comments to the authors about the book before it's published! See snapshot of those features below.

We hope to have the authors do an author chat soon so will keep you posted on that opportunity to talk to Greg, Dave and John about the book.

Thanks!

Christy Confetti Higgins
Digital Library Program - Sun Learning Services

Sun's Digital Libraries & Research team, part of Sun Learning Services, is partnering on an internal pilot of Sun's Project Wonderland with Sun's Services Marketing organization.

The library team (as we call ourselves) will be conducting a workshop in this internal instance of Wonderland, for Sun employees to learn about market and competitive information services. Part of the session will be slides and part will be live demo in this engaging and dynamic virtual world setting.

Participants will also be able to learn from pre-programmed bots in this open library space as well as interact with internal library resources via the Firefox browner in-world.

A key benefit we see is that the attendees will not only have the opportunity to learn, but to interact with each other as a community drawn together by their shared interest in market and competitive information.

This is a pilot so we hope to learn a lot about how we can leverage this for employee learning of library resources, information and knowledge sharing and more dynamic/immersive experiences related to information.

Wish us luck!

Digital Libraries & Research Team!
http://twitter.com/libraryresearch