REConnect: Participatory RE Framework

• REConnect is a participatory requirements engineering framework that centers system design on human connection and cultural context.
• It operationalizes relational engagement through REActions like immersive fieldwork, co-design workshops, and iterative prototyping.
• The approach integrates generative AI as a supportive tool while ensuring human oversight, ethical alignment, and sustainable system development.

REConnect refers to a participatory, human-centered framework and methodology for requirements engineering (RE) that deliberately re-centers the RE process on human connection, lived experience, and societal impact. Proposed as a corrective to CrowdRE and AI-assisted elicitation strategies that risk detachment from contextualized human values and needs, REConnect advocates for a relational and participatory approach to eliciting, analyzing, and validating requirements—emphasizing cultural grounding, co-design, and stakeholder empowerment as fundamentals for sustainable, legitimate system development (Damian et al., 31 Aug 2025).

1. Foundational Principles and Theoretical Basis

REConnect is structured around three core, interrelated principles:

1. Building Trusting Relationships: Sustained, direct engagement with stakeholders in their cultural, social, and political environments is prioritized. Practitioners are expected to “be on the ground” through extended fieldwork, semi-structured dialogue, and contextual stakeholder mapping. This mode of engagement uncovers both explicit needs and implicit values, unlocking critical but unspoken requirements embedded in local practice and worldview.
2. Co-Designing With and Alongside Stakeholders: Users are treated not as passive informants but as co-creators who directly participate in workshops, prototyping, roleplay, and simulation exercises. Co-design processes integrate user agency at every level, producing requirements and system architectures that are not only technically robust but culturally situated and socially endorsed.
3. Empowering Users as Agents of Change: Stakeholder empowerment is embedded through capacity-building and direct inclusion in decision-making, ensuring requirements reflect local aspirations and can be sustained and adapted beyond system delivery. This includes motivation mapping (linking solutions to stakeholder drives), delegated authority for local influencers, and training/skills transfer.

These principles collectively ensure that requirements are not only functionally correct but are also resilient to the sociocultural and political dynamics of deployment contexts.

2. REActions: Operationalization Via Actionable Practices

REConnect translates its principles into actionable practices denoted as “REActions,” which systematically embed relationality throughout the requirements lifecycle. Each principle is instantiated via distinct sets of practices:

REConnect Principle	Associated REActions
Building Trusting Relationships	Contextual Stakeholder Mapping, Immersive Field Presence, Facilitated Community Workshops
Co-Designing With/Alongside	Iterative Prototyping & Simulation, Community-Engaged Requirement Mapping, Co-Design Artifacts
Empowering Users	Motivation Mapping, Decisional Inclusion, Capacity Building & Training

These actions are interleaved throughout all lifecycle phases, from elicitation and requirement decomposition through iterative design and validation, creating a feedback-rich, relational requirements engineering process.

3. Empirical Foundation through Case Studies

The efficacy and impact of REConnect are demonstrated through three detailed, contextually diverse case studies:

• BloodSync (Nepal):

Addressing blood shortages in rural districts, field presence and integration with local leadership led to a requirements shift from a standard donor database app to a coordination system centered around ward leaders and community trust agents. Empowerment and trust-building resulted in effective local governance, improved operational performance, and post-deployment sustainability.

• Herluma (Canada):

Supporting women at risk of homelessness, extensive engagement with shelter operators and community organizations revealed the primacy of privacy, leading to system requirements around pseudonymization and secure communications. Direct involvement of shelter staff—many with lived experience—ensured the system matched real user needs and operational constraints.

• BridgingRoots (Canadian Arctic):

For Indigenous language revitalization, co-design workshops and extended fieldwork led to a culturally appropriate, game-based language tool. The process empowered local youth to become digital content creators, aligning requirements not just with educational goals but with cultural transmission and community stewardship.

These cases demonstrate the critical role of relational engagement and co-design for achieving requirements that are socially legitimate, culturally robust, and operationally sustainable.

4. Integration with Generative AI

REConnect is explicitly positioned for the generative AI era, not as an anti-automation stance but as an integrative methodology ensuring human agency and value alignment in AI-augmented RE workflows. The framework prescribes that:

• AI is a Tool for Human Empowerment: While AI can accelerate knowledge discovery (e.g., summarizing stakeholder transcripts, clustering user stories), it must not supplant human curation, contextualization, or ethical oversight.
• Human Stakeholders as Curators and Guardians: Stakeholders act as guardians of ethical constraints, curators of AI outputs, inclusion amplifiers in interactive sensemaking, and accountable decision-makers in co-reflective design review cycles.
• Iterative Human–AI Collaboration: AI-generated alternatives are subjected to participatory evaluation, ensuring final system design remains under community stewardship.

This approach is formalized in tables mapping process steps to stakeholder roles and engagement strategies, for example (reproduced in LaTeX-style):

\begin{table}[h] \caption{Stakeholder Roles in Human--AI Collaboration and Empowerment Strategies} \begin{tabular}{p{3cm} p{2cm} p{3.5cm} p{3.5cm}} \textbf{REConnect Step} & \textbf{Stakeholder Role} & \textbf{Description} & \textbf{Engagement/Empowerment Strategy} \ \midrule Human-Centered Groundwork & Guardians of values/ethics & Set and monitor ethical guardrails & Ensure requirements reflect moral/social priorities \ AI-Assisted Knowledge Discovery & Curators/contextualizers & Define and interpret AI findings & Clarify relevance to lived experience \ Human Interpretation (Sensemaking) & Curators/inclusion amplifiers & Contextualize findings & Correct omissions, reinforce diversity \ Aligning Motivations & Accountability partners & Map motivations to capabilities & Verify traceability, reinforce trust \ Co-Designing with AI & Co-reflectors & Iterative review/prototyping & Maintain autonomy and design ownership \ \end{tabular} \end{table}

5. Critical Perspective, Scope, and Empirical Rigor

REConnect is intended as a direct response to the limitations of CrowdRE and generic AI-driven RE methods that privilege scalability and formal rationality at the expense of context, legitimacy, and value-aligned solutions. It places continuous engagement and relational practices above one-off elicitation or the mere aggregation of user wishes.

The framework is not a rejection of automation, but a call to re-embed requirements engineering within the full complexity of real-world values, community contexts, and power relations. Empirical evidence is grounded in cases where participatory RE led to altered—often fundamentally revised—requirements sets, increased long-term system adoption, and broader societal impact. REConnect’s formalization of actionable practices and support for integration with AI workflows ensures methodological clarity and reproducibility for research and applied RE practice.

6. Broader Implications and Future Directions

Adoption of REConnect can result in:

• Requirements artifacts that exhibit strong community legitimacy, value-alignment, and sustainability
• Stakeholder empowerment that persists after deployment, facilitating iterative evolution and stewardship
• Transparent, traceable integration of AI outputs governed by explicit human oversight
• Harmonization of technical, ethical, and cultural requirements for complex sociotechnical systems

Ongoing research directions include the formal definition of trust metrics within participatory RE, empirical evaluation of REActions in large-scale and cross-cultural contexts, and automated support tools for mapping, logging, and visualizing relational engagement over the entire RE lifecycle.

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REConnect thus represents a participatory, relationship-oriented framework that systematically embeds social, cultural, and ethical considerations in requirements engineering, while enabling informed and contextually grounded integration of AI-based methods, with demonstrated impact across diverse domains and communities (Damian et al., 31 Aug 2025).