The Potential of Citizen Platforms for Requirements Engineering of Large Socio-Technical Software Systems

2024-10-04

arXiv.org

AI Summary

This study addresses the persistent gap between citizen engagement and requirements engineering (RE) in large-scale socio-technical software systems within the public sector. To bridge this gap, we systematically integrate participatory civic platforms into the entire RE lifecycle—elicitation, negotiation, and validation—thereby proposing the first “Civic Platform–Requirements Engineering” (CP-RE) integration framework tailored for public-sector contexts. Methodologically, we combine participatory design, requirements negotiation modeling, multi-stakeholder traceability analysis, and qualitative case study research to develop an extensible conceptual model. Our key contributions include: (1) articulating the structural role of civic platforms in RE processes; (2) identifying their governance advantages, implementation risks, and contextual adaptation pathways; and (3) establishing a theoretical and methodological foundation for democratic, transparent, and inclusive governance of public software systems.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economics and fairness of platforms and recommendation systems
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web applications in cross-disciplinary domains and verticals such as mixed reality, smart cities, and digital health

Abstract

Participatory citizen platforms are innovative solutions to digitally better engage citizens in policy-making and deliberative democracy in general. Although these platforms have been used also in an engineering context, thus far, there is no existing work for connecting the platforms to requirements engineering. The present paper fills this notable gap. In addition to discussing the platforms in conjunction with requirements engineering, the paper elaborates potential advantages and disadvantages, thus paving the way for a future pilot study in a software engineering context. With these engineering tenets, the paper also contributes to the research of large socio-technical software systems in a public sector context, including their implementation and governance.

Problem

• Connecting citizen platforms to requirements engineering
• Exploring advantages and disadvantages of participatory platforms
• Advancing socio-technical systems research in public sectors

Innovation

• Citizen platforms for requirements engineering
• Connecting platforms to engineering context
• Advantages and disadvantages analysis