Modelling and Classification of Fairness Patterns for Designing Sustainable Information Systems

TL;DR

This paper develops a framework for modeling fairness patterns in sociotechnical system design to promote sustainability, using a meta-model, case studies, and a fairness library to guide decision-making.

Contribution

It introduces a novel meta-model and a structured library of fairness patterns to support sustainable and fair information system design.

Findings

Fairness patterns can be systematically identified and structured.

The framework is validated through case studies on COVID-19 and childhood follow-up.

The extended meta-model helps identify assumptions and barriers to fairness.

Abstract

Designing sustainable systems involves complex interactions between environmental resources, social impacts, and economic issues. In a constrained world, the challenge is to achieve a balanced design across those dimensions while avoiding several barriers to adoption. This paper explores the concept of fairness in sociotechnical system design, including its information system component. It is based on a reference sustainability meta-model capturing the concepts of value, assumption, regulation, metric and task. Starting from a set of published cases, different fairness patterns were identified and structured in a library enabling the application of strategies for adoption, anticipation, distributive justice, and transparency. They were generalised and documented using an existing sustainability template. An extension to the initial meta-model is also proposed to identify and reason on assumptions and barriers to reach the desired values. Finally, the validation of our work is discussed using two case studies, respectively addressing the fairness to manage the COVID-19 crisis and the medico-social follow-up of childhood.