Governance in Sociotechnical Systems: Addressing Stakeholder Concerns In-Band

We address the challenge of administering sociotechnical systems, which inherently involve a combination of software systems, people, and organizations. Such systems have a variety of stakeholders, each in essence autonomous and contributing distinct concerns. Traditional architectural approaches assume that stakeholder concerns are fixed in advance and addressed out-of-band with respect to the system. In contrast, sociotechnical systems of interest have long lifetimes with changing stakeholders and concerns. We propose addressing stakeholders’ concerns in-band during the operation of the system, thus supporting flexibility despite change. Our approach is based on contracts among stakeholders; the contracts are streamlined through a formal notion of organizations. We demonstrate our approach on a large sociotechnical system we are building as part of the Ocean Observatories Initiative.