Results of Blockchain-Oriented Software Engineering 2024 Workshop: speculations on Blockchain for Energy Communities management

In this paper we resume the main results of the seventh International Workshop on Blockchain Oriented Software Engineering and speculate on the perspective of a new trend where Blockchain seeks application to the management of renewable energy communities. The workshop intended to gather researchers from industry and academia to discuss the problems faced by software engineers within the new emerging blockchain technologies, where new software paradigms are involved. This is motivated by the overgrowing interest on this new technology in academy, industry, software communities, finance and media, with an exponential increase of both the companies exploiting the blockchain technology, and published papers about it. The focus of IWBOSE is on the application of software engineering principles and best practices, including re- engineering and analysis, to blockchain-oriented software development and Smart Contracts coding and integration, which need a tailored and specific approach. Among the most recent applications, we take a specific look at the management of energy communities and examine some interesting applications of this technology in the energy sector emerged from the most discussed topics on technical forums. We focus on the most discussed related topics, identified amongst a dataset of articles extracted from CoinDesk, which are presented in a paper accepted at the workshop. We aimed to identify from those selected papers important topics related to energy markets, energy communities, energy traceability, and energy certification.