The thing itself speaks: Accountability as a foundation for requirements in sociotechnical systems

We consider sociotechnical systems (STSs) that facilitate social interaction among autonomous principals (either humans or organizations). Although accountability is a foundational concept in such systems, established requirements engineering methods do not support accountability in the broad sense of calling to account of one party by another. To address this shortcoming, we propose the notion of accountability requirement. Further, we claim that to model an STS means to precisely capture the accountability requirements between its principals.