Societal IT Systems Development

Societal IT systems development. Towards a discursive process-oriented multi-perspective approach to co-designing, -operating, -assessing, and -regulating societally relevant IT systems

Rainer Rehak's dissertation deals with the development of societally relevant IT systems. Since current methodologies focus on intra-organisational development, the work took on this gap by extending the evolutionary participatory STEPS model with a discursive, a material and an interconnected dimension, e.g. also grasping societal negotiations regarding problem definitions and technical options as part of the development process as well as the loss of control in increasingly networked configurations or the understanding of participatory processes as epistemic struggles and political processes. A tangible result is the new scientific method Active-Discoursive Analysis in Computer Science (ADACS) – and its practical version rapid ADACS (rADACS) – for analysing societal IT systems in all three dimensions of the model to be used in academic research, practical IT systems development and teaching/training alike. The doctoral thesis combines IT systems development, data protection theory, political science and conviviality for addressing the increasingly important societal role of computer science.