Introduction - Informing Digital Futures: Strategies for Citizen Engagement - page 4

and their implications for design are explored. Therefore, unless we are
referring to people who are actual, current users of technologies, we
have tended to use the terms stakeholders and citizens to denote potential
users.
The ubiquitous term stakeholders merits some attention as we use it
quite often. The stakeholder concept emerged in the 1960s among academ-
ics at the Stanford Research Institute. They proposed that, instead of focus-
ing exclusively on shareholders, a firm also should be responsible to a
variety of stakeholders without whose support the organisation would
collapse. The term was made known and expanded by Freeman (1984). He
included in the stakeholder definition “ any group or individual who can
affect or is affected by the achievement of the organisation's objectives ”.
This expansion of the original concept resulted in widening the view of the
firm from a strictly economic perspective to a political one (Correia 2005).
In the context of ICTs, stakeholders are defined as “ individuals or organi-
sations who stand to gain or lose from the success or failure of a system ”
(Nuseibeh and Easterbrook 2000). In the past, it was a useful way of dis-
tinguishing between users (who operated computers) and those who were
in some other way impacted by them. The list below (Hackos and Redish
1998) gives an indication of the range of people who might fall into this
category:
• individuals who buy software and use it without assistance or interaction
with others, either at home or in the workplace;
• individuals who use the interface and information as part of the work
they do, even though someone else purchases the product;
• groups of people who use software and information as part of a larger
business process;
• those who administer the software so that others may use it successfully
and who are, themselves, users of the administration interface;
• individuals who repair products that are broken or who troubleshoot sys-
tems and processes that fail to work as intended and who are, themselves,
users of maintenance interfaces and information;
• those who install products for themselves and others and are, them-
selves, users of installation software and information;
• customers of the users and others who are affected by users working
with the interface and information.
Our perspective is that all citizens are stakeholders in the Information
Society by virtue of the all-pervasive nature of ICTs. The sometimes un-
seen presence and influence of digital technologies on every aspect of our
lives suggests that, in a democracy, citizens have every reason and right to