Understanding the Strategic Actor Diagram: an Exercise of Meta Modeling

i-star (i*) modeling uses the actor concept to ground the intentions of a given Universe of Discourse. Our work contributes to the understanding of the actor concept as used in i*. We have used a collaborative approach to better understand the actor concept. The authors met 9 times to discuss the topic. The goal was to discuss i* meta-models, which was later specialized to discuss actor modeling. After the meetings and after one week of collaborative work using a collaboration based editor, “Writely”, we have agreed on presenting our model from two different perspectives, but both using UML as the meta language. We understand that these models, designed by consensus, represent what we have labeled the SA Diagram or the Strategic Actor Diagram. The article presents the models we have arrived as well as the process we have used. We believe that making this process transparent will help to shed light not only on the concept of actor, but on the process of meta-modeling as well.