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The examination of human values integrated in technologically advanced systems can provide novel perspectives on the broader societal impact of the adoption of those systems. Many blockchain networks are developed and operated through the collaboration of people from countries with diverse social and political ideologies. We describe a data-driven approach to study the human values in blockchains, and their relationships with human values in constitutions from around the world. We introduce a novel collection of datasets, comprising annotated human values references from representative blockchain documents, and unique constitutions from 194 sovereign states. We conduct an initial exploratory dataset analysis to establish baselines to motivate further research in the area. Our analysis demonstrates that the human values in blockchains exhibit centrism in their alignment with geopolitical ideologies. 

Software systems, particularly those in safety-critical domains or those handling personal data and financial transactions, must navigate a complex landscape of legal regulations while also aligning with societal values. Prior research has largely focused on either regulatory compliance or human values, but rarely on their integration. This paper introduces the Accountable Design Process (ADP), supported by the Accountable Design Assistant (ADA)—an LLM-driven tool that identifies relevant laws, maps them to societal values, and evaluates candidate design solutions from both legal and ethical perspectives. We demonstrate ADP’s ecological validity through two case studies: a Wireless Baby Monitor and multi-vehicle autonomous Uncrewed Aerial Systems. Additionally, a focus group of domain experts reviewed the outcomes of the second case study, providing initial validation of the approach. The results illustrate how ADP’s dual emphasis on legal compliance and societal values can effectively support the development of accountable, regulation-aligned systems. 

Recent work has recognized the importance of developing and deploying software systems that reflect human values and has explored different approaches for eliciting these values from stakeholders. However, prior studies have also shown that it can be challenging for stakeholders to specify a diverse set of product-related human values. In this paper we therefore explore the use of ChatGPT for generating user stories that describe candidate human values. These generated stories provide inspiration to stakeholder discussions and enrich the human-created user stories. We engineer a series of ChatGPT prompts to retrieve a list of common stakeholders and candidate features for a targeted product, and then, for each pairwise combination of role and feature, and for each individual Schwartz value, we issue an additional prompt to generate a candidate user story reflecting that value. We present the candidate user-stories to stakeholders and, as part of a creative requirements engineering session, we ask them to assess and prioritize the generated user-stories, and then use them as inspiration for discussing and specifying their own product-related human values. Through conducting a series of focus groups we compare the human-values created by stakeholders with and without the benefit of the ChatGPT examples. Results are evaluated with respect to coverage of values, clarity of expression, internal completeness, and through feedback from our participants. Results from our analysis show that the ChatGPT-generated user stories are able to provide creativity triggers that help stakeholders to specify human values for a product. 

Software systems are increasingly expected to address a broad range of stakeholder values representing both personal and societal values as well as values ensconced as laws and regulations. Whereas laws and regulations must be fully addressed, other human values need to be carefully analyzed and prioritized within the context of candidate architectural designs. The majority of prior work has investigated requirements engineering techniques for either regulatory compliance or for human-values, we take an integrated approach which simultaneously considers laws and regulations as well as societal and personal human values throughout the system analysis, specification, and design process. We illustrate our approach through detailed examples drawn from a multi-drone system regulated by the USA Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) and operating in a domain rich with human and societal values. We then discuss requirements engineering challenges and solutions unique to identifying analyzing, and prioritizing human, societal, and regulatory requirements, and ultimately for designing accountable software systems.