Software for self-government

Government bureaucracies are both extremely complex and long-lived, constantly evolving to reflect and influence their ever changing cultural and physical environments. Software support for government bureaucracies therefore represents a major challenge for the historically statist paradigm of Software Engineering. The internet increasingly allows both the seamless distribution of computing power, and control over the computation that takes place. In this medium traditional boundaries, such as those between software developers and target organizations, may be blurred. This paper adumbrates a distributed software production paradigm which places support for ongoing socio-technical evolution, emergence, and autopoiesis at the centre of its concerns. In particular a new process based architecture is introduced as a mechanism through which socio-technical fusion at the organizational level may be achieved. KEYWORDS Software Engineering, Evolution, Autopoiesis, Government, Active Modelling...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: IADIS
• Authors: Thomas B. Senior, Brian Warboys
• Keywords: Government Bureaucracies, IADIS 2004, IADIS 2008, Ongoing Socio-technical Evolution, Software Engineering