-Many disciplines see a paradigm shift towards more participative processes. Requirements Engineering is a collaboratively creative process, so it entails stakeholder participation to a certain level. But how far should stakeholders be involved? Would more participation result in more sustainable systems? We draw on some studies from other disciplines to indicate that participation has indeed potential to support sustainability, if some obstacles can be handled appropriately. Index Terms-Participation, Sustainability, Requirements Engineering.1
Participation refers to the involvement of several
stakeholders in the process of doing something. As RE is a
collaboratively creative process [
We may define “participative RE processes” as those where stakeholders from various areas of stakes are expected to actively work together to discover, validate, document or analyze requirements elements. A process is considered more participative if more people from more stake areas are involved, if they interact in a more direct way with each other, if their potential influence on decisions is bigger, and if they are allowed to influence on more topics. For example, an analyst interviewing stakeholders at the start of a project and then not referring back to them before the go-live is on the lower scale of participation. Agile processes with scrum meetings every morning and client demonstration every week are certainly higher. Using participative design techniques (as creative workshops) with final users and several experts will also raise the level of participation of an RE process.
participation in RE processes lead to more sustainable systems?
Virtually any discipline is seeing a participative trend
growing. Health is perhaps an interesting one, where the
almighty power of the specialist is slowly leaving space to
online health forums, where experiences are shared, and
advices come from all directions. More formal forms of
participative health processes are carefully studied by
researchers [
micro-blogging platforms and online media, changing the
paradigm from broadcast to multi-directional discussion [
The studies and experiments related to in the section above, along with the experience that the author has as a facilitator of participative processes in RE, lead us to think that, indeed, participation has a strong potential to lead to more sustainable systems. However, this will not be automatic, and many obstacles have to be mitigated. We develop below an initial argumentation, building on studies in the social development and journalism domains.
Firstly, it is worth to note that in social development projects, participation is seen as being a component of sustainable development [15]. In this discipline, participation has been seen as a way to empower people, consequently leading to a better control on their own lives in the long term [14]. A similar pattern exists when, in a company, participative innovation is fostered, leading to empowerment and more satisfaction [16]. In short, we can say that successful participation means empowerment, which obviously supports social sustainability.
Empowering people also relates to democracy, and participation efforts in this sector have shown that sustainable development indeed needs participation [10]. Both in Africa and in Belgium, participation is shown to work well and to relate to sustainable decision making from involved citizens [14], [15]. Those works also indicate that projects using successful participation have a better acceptance rate, last longer and consequently have a stronger impact. This relates to sustainability in that projects that are not accepted or shortlived represent an important waste of resources and energy.
In Belgium, cases illustrate how participation allows
deconstruction and creative reconstruction of problem frames,
by allowing circulation of the problem in various dimensions
and spaces. Participation helps to open up the solution space
and let us come to richer solutions that cope with more
objectives and constraints, including sustainability constraints
that were sometimes out of the initial scope, before the
participation [15]. Doelle and Sinclair also advocate that a
consensus making form of participation will be more efficient
and lead to more sustainable outcomes than an a-posteriori
assessment one [13]. Journalism also indicates promises from
participation, imagining the discipline as a conversation rather
than broadcasting [6], nurturing better democracy. People are
ready to participatively fund independent journals, and are
shown to do so for contributing to common good and social
change [
Real participative processes may be rich, but always cost time, and are not always possible or even desirable. The first problem with participative processes concerns the possibility for the participation to be controlled by a certain type of people, more skilled or culturally stronger. The idea that participation is a discussion forum without rules must thus be rejected, at the risk of seeing the stronger impose its opinions by influencing others in a way or another [15]. Lyons et al. indicate experiences where participation failed for such reasons [14].
But even if there is no such strong person or group, the risk
of seeing participants fighting for their own personal, local,
short-term interests exists. In these circumstances, the process
will be inefficient and lead nowhere. Lyons et al. also show
such examples in African development projects: where no
democratic and transparent cultures and infrastructures were in
place around the project, the participation failed to bear its
promises [14]. Participative processes are indeed vulnerable to
malfunctioning environments. There is sometimes a huge work
to accomplish before the environment is ready for participation.
The failure described above draws this conclusion, along with
failures in participative journalism: Goode indicates that people
and systems, including software running at major crowd-media
platforms, have to make their way [
Another common concern is about the quality of work that
can be achieved by amateurs participating, and the place that
professional, or experts, should take in the process. The
example of online medical forums is probably making this
problem clear. Bypassing doctors and doing auto-diagnostic
and auto-medication online can potentially be extremely
dangerous. Similarly, information relayed by micro-blogging
platforms, escaping the journalistic validation, have the
potential to convey wrong information at a dangerously rapid
rate [
Finally, we underline that, if participation is to lead to more sustainability, beyond the positive social aspect of empowering people, we need participants who care about sustainability. The various cases of urban development in Belgium showed that involving a greater public did brought environmental concerns to the front while some of these aspects had been neglected by experts. In general, participation relies on strong stakeholders analysis, which we have been used to in Requirements
Participation has the potential to lead to more sustainable systems, mainly by empowering participants and by offering the possibility to creatively use a diversity of points of view to build more adequate systems, and systems that respect more sustainability constraints. Indeed, the involvement of more stakeholders tends to bring more sustainability concerns to the front than when experts only analyzed situations.
and people and, sometimes, important work is needed before participation can be a success. Facilitation will be needed too, this is the new role of experts and professionals, changing their relation to the users/public/audience.
Important questions also remain to be answered, such as
how should one select stakeholders so that together they will
emphasize all important sustainability aspects to account for in
a system; or, how many stakeholders should one draw from a
particular community to be sure that sustainability will be
covered during requirement elicitation?
[
IEEE conf. on Research Challenges in Information Science,
teaching model: the partnership of students and teachers in practice teaching’, Soc. Work Educ., vol. 26, no. 4, pp. 348– 358, 2007. ‘Co-Learning’. [Online]. Available: http://www.colearning.com/. [Accessed: 03-May-2013].
New Media Soc., vol. 11, no. 8, pp. 1287–1305, 2009. [6] T. Aitamurto, ‘The Impact of Crowdfunding on Journalism’,
Journal. Pr., vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 429–445, 2011.
[
[Accessed: 03-May-2013].
[
Available: http://www.g1000.org/en/. [Accessed: 03-May2013]. [12] ‘Welcome to Participedia | Participedia’. [Online]. Available: http://www.participedia.net/. [Accessed: 03-May-2013]. [13] M. Doelle and A. J. Sinclair, ‘Time for a new approach to public participation in EA: Promoting cooperation and consensus for sustainability’, Environ. Impact Assess. Rev., vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 185–205, Mar. 2006. [14] M. Lyons, C. Smuts, and A. Stephens, ‘Participation,
Work?’, Urban Stud., vol. 38, no. 8, pp. 1233–1251, Jan. 2001. [15] M. Mormont, Catherine Mougenot, and C. Dasnoy, ‘La participation composante du développement durable : quatre études de cas’, Vertigo - Rev. Électronique En Sci. Environ., no. Volume 7 Numéro 2, Sep. 2006. [16] ‘Etude sur l’innovation participative 2011’. [Online].
Available: http://www.innovacteurs.asso.fr/?page_id=29. [Accessed: 10-Jan-2012]. [17] B. Penzenstadler, Femmer, Henning, and Richardson, Debra, ‘Who Is the Advocate? Stakeholders for Sustainability’, in <To be defined>. (and other domains) To Requirements Engineering:
Will
More
Participation lead to More
Sustainable Systems Influence
decisions of participation Many, Direct
and more bidirectional conversation...
Development
Projects Local communities are invited to take active roles development projects that
affect them: schools, garbage management and the like are more and more designed by all
Health Online health forums are countless. People help each other and take active role in sustaining their health and their peers ones
Policy Making
Voting is not enough.
Citizen's deliberations and panels reinvent the way citizens can help politicians get out of the dead ends...
Learning & Knowledge Anyone can now offer courses on anything via online learning platforms.
Knowledge is built collaboratively via wikis.
Engineering While well known in IT, open source is also permeating hardware: the first open source cars are coming!. … if obstacles can be mitigated. Will this be restricted to a certain elite, more skilled or able to influence others ? Can this process live in
any environment? People, structures, cultures are not necessarily ready for this kind of reasoning...
People
will fight for their interest where local, personal and short term concerns might take over collective interest and long term challenges such
as sustainability ? Will amateurs take over experts and pro's alike, and still be able to produce quality work?
Specific facilitation is required to enable a fairly distributed network of influence. environment has to specifically set up for participation.
excluding
High Participation …from studies and
experiments in those
fields, we learn that participation can lead to more sustainability...
People are
empowered, so more happy, as they have more control over their lives / their work.
democracy is revived by this empowerment.
Participation
opens up solution spaces, entailing consensus making out of a large spectrum of points of view, allowing for a richer and more
processes, and
RE is a collaboratively creative process, so participation is required some point. But how far should we take it ? how does that impact sustainability ?