[agents] Reminder: Special Issue on Requirements Engineering for the journal Ethics and Information Technology

[Virginia Dignum - TBM]

Call for Papers for a Special Issue with Ethics and Information Technology on

"Requirements Engineering"

 

 

In making choices in the design of information systems, designers "necessarily impart social and moral values". Once a system has been put into use, it affects its stakeholders by supporting or hindering their values to various degrees. Examples of stakeholders' values that are hindered or supported by technology are privacy, autonomy, openness, identity, human welfare, ownership and property, freedom from bias, and trust. This ultimately affects the acceptability of information systems. On the other hand, systems affect the way people act and interact and have ultimately an effect on values and social norms.

In as far as design methodologies explicitly take values into account in the design process, it is in the form of soft constraints or similar constructs that are identified in the requirements engineering phase of software development. However, in representing values as informal soft constraints, designers run the risk of leaving the impact values have on the design implicit. Therefore, values should be made explicit in order to have an identifiable and justifiable effect on the design, and they should play an important role in the early requirements phase

 

The purpose of this special issue on Requirements Engineering is to address explicitly how values can be/should be dealt with during the requirements engineering phase of system development. 

 

Submitted papers are requested to explore issues concerning the following research questions: 

1)      Value elicitation: to what extent are existing methods for requirement elicitation and/or knowledge elicitation useful for value elicitation? Proposals for techniques and methods dedicated to value elicitation are welcome too.

2)      How to deal with conflicts between the values of stakeholders? What if the system developers have conflicting values with those of the stakeholders? How to support multi-actor analysis to align conflicting values of multiple stakeholders? How to support negotiations about conflicting values to facilitate this alignment process between stakeholders?

3)      How should we model, document, report on design decisions and their relations (benefits/harms) with stakeholder values? 

4)      How to integrate value-sensitive design of information systems in existing requirements engineering methods, or even to develop new methods for this.

5)      Given the inherent difference in abstraction, how can the relations between values and design decisions be explicitly represented and reasoned with? 

 

The editors at Ethics and Information Technology are seeking articles for a special issue in this area. Submissions will be double-blind refereed for relevance to the theme as well as academic rigor and originality. High quality articles not deemed to be sufficiently relevant to the special issue may be considered for publication in a subsequent non-themed issue.

 

Closing date for submissions: March 10, 2011

 

To submit your paper, please use the online submission system, to be found at www.editorialmanager.com/etin <http://www.editorialmanager.com/etin> 

 

There will be a workshop on this topic hosted at Delft University of Technology when the special issue comes out.

Please contact the special guest editor(s) for more information,

 

Catholijn Jonker 

C.M.Jonker at tudelft.nl <mailto:C.M.Jonker at tudelft.nl> 

 

Virginia Dignum

M.V.Dignum at tudelft.nl 

 

Yao-Hua Tan

Y.Tan at tudelft.nl 

 

Frances Brazier

F.M.Brazier at tudelft.nl 

 

Or the managing editor,

 

Noëmi Manders-Huits

N.L.J.L.Manders-Huits at tudelft.nl <mailto:N.L.J.L.Manders-Huits at tudelft.nl> 

 

 

Ethics and Information Technology (ETIN) is the major journal in the field of moral and political reflection on Information Technology. Its aim is to advance the dialogue between moral philosophy and the field of information technology in a broad sense, and to foster and promote reflection and analysis concerning the ethical, social and political questions associated with the adoption, use, and development of IT.