Interactive Self-Governance and Value-Sensitive Design for Self-Organising Socio-technical Systems

The saturation of the physical environment with sensors, the proliferation of personal mobile computing, and the prominence ofArtificial Intelligence in (so-called) 'smart' objects has created new opportunities for the development of socio-technical systems. We are particularly interested in the convergence of people and computational processes (agents) in the creation of digital communities for sustainabilityand successful collective action. However, prior experience with intelligent and adaptive user interfaces suggests that the symbiosisof people and technology needs to be carefully considered. This paper presents three applications of self-organising socio-technicalsystems, from which we derive design guidelines for implementing interactive self-governance. The guidelines are related to the methodology of value-sensitive design and the need to actualise human values as acritical supra-functional requirement of future socio-technical systems.