Special Theme: Social REsponsibility

The technological progress, the increasing digitalization and emerging trends offer great potential to positively support and facilitate our everyday life. Due to this tremendous influence that technology nowadays has on our society, it is (increasingly) important to carefully consider the impact that digital solutions have on our society during development activities.

RE is a socio-technical discipline that aims to understand and analyze the needs of stakeholders affected by the introduction of digital solutions and to communicate these needs to the development team. This mediator role enables our community to have a major impact on the goals, capabilities, functionalities and qualities of digital solutions and thus take RESPONSIBILITY for the social impact that these solutions bring. With this special theme we aim to raise awareness for this “Social REsponsibility”, to share challenges / ideas / project experience and to foster discussions around the following questions:

    How can our RE community contribute to the “social good”?

    How to support “Responsible Design” through requirements engineering?

    How to actively involve the society (respectively large / heterogeneous stakeholder groups) into RE activities (e.g., co-creation / co-design)?

    How to systematically derive, engineer and evaluate social values and impact?

    How to align social needs and “intelligent” systems evolution?

Paper Categories

We invite submissions along the following categories:

    Technical design papers (15 pages incl. references) describe the design of new artifacts, i.e., novel solutions for problems relevant to practice and/or significant and theoretically sound improvements of existing solutions. A preliminary validation of the artifacts is also expected.

    Scientific evaluation papers (15 pages incl. references) investigate existing real-world problems, evaluate existing artifacts implemented in real-world settings, or validate newly designed artifacts, e.g., by means such as case studies, action research, quasi-controlled experiments, simulations, surveys, or secondary studies if they clearly synthesize the state of reported evidence in literature (via systematic literature reviews or mapping studies). Please refer also to the Empirical Standards for guidelines and review criteria for each research method: https://github.com/acmsigsoft/EmpiricalStandards

    Experience report papers (12 pages incl. references) describe retrospective reports on experiences in applying RE techniques in practice, or addressing RE problems in real-world contexts. These papers focus on reporting the experience and give special attention to practical insights, lessons learned, and/or key takeaways and recommendations to the community. Experience reports may also include studies in which the authors interview practitioners about the application of specific RE techniques or about RE problems in practice.

    Vision papers (8 pages incl. references) state where research in the field should be heading.

    Research previews (8 pages incl. references) describe well-defined research ideas at an early stage of investigation which may not be fully developed.

Each type of paper has its own review criteria, which are listed here.

Finally, we cordially invite authors to disclose their research artifacts following our open science guidelines. Authors who wish to disclose their artifacts can find further guidance and support under the Open Science Initiative.