Composite Public Values and Software Specifications

Public values are desires of the general public, that are about properties considered societally valuable, such as respecting the privacy of citizens or prohibiting polluting activities. “Translating” public values into functional solutions is thus an actual challenge. Even though Value-Sensitive Design (VSD) is about weaving public values in the design of (technical) systems, it stays insufficiently concrete as it concerns the alignment between abstract public values and technical (software) solutions. Still, VSD indirectly inspires ideas in that direction as for example the idea to consider business process variants for achieving such an alignment. Nevertheless, this is all about “atomic” public values (encapsulating only one particular behavioral goal) while one would often face public values that are “composite” in the sense that they reflect a particular human attitude rather than just a desired behavioral goal. In the current paper, we propose a value decomposition approach that allows for operationalizing composite public values. We also present experimental results featuring data analytics using self-administrated surveys.