Teach sustainability in software engineering?

Sustainability is becoming an important topic in IT — as contribution of IT to safeguard our future, and as evolving market segment. IT's high productivity in combination with short life cycles and, on the other hand, growing resource problems of our planet, lead to a necessity that software engineers take their share of responsibility for sustainability. Therefore, we need to include the concept of sustainability into the university curriculum of computer science. The challenge is to motivate and interest students (and lecturers) for sustainability, to identify spheres of activity for software engineers, to build up competence fields for solutions, and to incorporate the topic into the syllabus. This paper presents a strategy for integrating the concept of sustainability into a degree course scheme across three stages: find a core of interested people by offering a seminar, then broaden the awareness for sustainability by offering a lecture series, and finally establish the topic by offering teach-the-teacher seminars and integration into software engineering lectures.