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 short-coming, 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.