Preparing research projects for sustainable software engineering in society

With the pervasive need for digitization in modern information society, publicly funded research projects increasingly focus on engineering digital approaches to manage societal processes. Such projects inherently face the challenge of establishing a sustainable software engineering culture. A major challenge thereby is that project consortia need to establish a distributed developer community that effectively and resource-efficiently aligns development efforts with the goals and needs of complex societal constellations beyond project lifetime. In this paper we extract empirical evidence from longitudinal studies in two large-scale research projects to outline typical challenges in such problem contexts and to develop an open source software engineering methodology for research projects, including supportive infrastructure and social instruments of community building and awareness. We thus contribute a comprehensive strategy preparing collaborative research projects for sustainable societal software engineering.