NIST AI RMF Playbook
AI RMF Playbook > Map > MAP 1.6

MAP 1.6: System requirements (e.g., "the system shall respect the privacy of its users") are elicited from and understood by relevant AI actors. Design decisions take socio-technical implications into account to address AI risks.

About:
AI system development requirements may outpace documentation processes for traditional software. When written requirements are unavailable or incomplete, AI actors may inadvertently overlook business and stakeholder needs, over-rely on implicit human biases such as confirmation bias and groupthink, and maintain exclusive focus on computational requirements.

Eliciting system requirements, designing for end users, and considering societal impacts early in the design phase is a priority that can enhance AI systems' trustworthiness.

Suggested Actions:
- Proactively incorporate trustworthy characteristics into system requirements.
- Establish mechanisms for regular communication and feedback between relevant AI actors and internal or external stakeholders related to system design or deployment decisions.
- Develop and standardize practices to assess potential impacts at all stages of the AI lifecycle, and in collaboration with interdisciplinary experts, actors external to the team that developed or deployed the AI system, and potentially impacted communities .
- Include potentially impacted groups, communities and external entities (e.g. civil society organizations, research institutes, local community groups, and trade associations) in the formulation of priorities, definitions and outcomes during impact assessment activities.
- Conduct qualitative interviews with end user(s) to regularly evaluate expectations and design plans related to Human-AI configurations and tasks.
- Analyze dependencies between contextual factors and system requirements. List potential impacts that may arise from not fully considering the importance of trustworthiness characteristics in any decision making.
- Follow responsible design techniques in tasks such as software engineering, product management, and participatory engagement. Some examples for eliciting and documenting stakeholder requirements include product requirement documents (PRDs), user stories, user interaction/user experience (UI/UX) research, systems engineering, ethnography and related field methods.
- Conduct user research to understand individuals, groups and communities that will be impacted by the AI, their values & context, and the role of systemic and historical biases. Integrate learnings into decisions about data selection and representation.

Transparency and Documentation:
### Organizations can document the following
- What type of information is accessible on the design, operations, and limitations of the AI system to external stakeholders, including end users, consumers, regulators, and individuals impacted by use of the AI system?
- To what extent is this information sufficient and appropriate to promote transparency? Promote transparency by enabling external stakeholders to access information on the design, operation, and limitations of the AI system.
- To what extent has relevant information been disclosed regarding the use of AI systems, such as (a) what the system is for, (b) what it is not for, (c) how it was designed, and (d) what its limitations are? (Documentation and external communication can offer a way for entities to provide transparency.)
- How will the relevant AI actor(s) address changes in accuracy and precision due to either an adversary's attempts to disrupt the AI system or unrelated changes in the operational/business environment, which may impact the accuracy of the AI system?
- What metrics has the entity developed to measure performance of the AI system?
- What justifications, if any, has the entity provided for the assumptions, boundaries, and limitations of the AI system?

### AI Transparency Resources
- GAO-21-519SP: AI Accountability Framework for Federal Agencies & Other Entities. [URL](https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-21-519sp)
- Stakeholders in Explainable AI, Sep. 2018. [URL]( http://arxiv.org/abs/1810.00184)
- High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence set up by the European Commission, Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI. [URL](https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/ethics-guidelines-trustworthy-ai), [PDF](https://www.aepd.es/sites/default/files/2019-12/ai-ethics-guidelines.pdf)

References:
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2022. Fostering Responsible Computing Research: Foundations and Practices. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. [URL](https://doi.org/10.17226/26507)

Abeba Birhane, William S. Isaac, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Mark Diaz, Madeleine Clare Elish, Iason Gabriel and Shakir Mohamed. "Power to the People? Opportunities and Challenges for Participatory AI." Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization (2022). [URL](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.07572.pdf)

Amit K. Chopra, Fabiano Dalpiaz, F. Başak Aydemir, et al. 2014. Protos: Foundations for engineering innovative sociotechnical systems. In 2014 IEEE 22nd International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE) (2014), 53-62. [URL](https://doi.org/10.1109/RE.2014.6912247)

Andrew D. Selbst, danah boyd, Sorelle A. Friedler, et al. 2019. Fairness and Abstraction in Sociotechnical Systems. In Proceedings of the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT* '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 59-68. [URL](https://doi.org/10.1145/3287560.3287598)

Gordon Baxter and Ian Sommerville. 2011. Socio-technical systems: From design methods to systems engineering. Interacting with Computers, 23, 1 (Jan. 2011), 4-17. [URL](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intcom.2010.07.003)

Roel Dobbe, Thomas Krendl Gilbert, and Yonatan Mintz. 2021. Hard choices in artificial intelligence. Artificial Intelligence 300 (14 July 2021), 103555, ISSN 0004-3702. [URL](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.artint.2021.103555)

Yilin Huang, Giacomo Poderi, Sanja Šćepanović, et al. 2019. Embedding Internet-of-Things in Large-Scale Socio-technical Systems: A Community-Oriented Design in Future Smart Grids. In The Internet of Things for Smart Urban Ecosystems (2019), 125-150. Springer, Cham. [URL](https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96550-5_6)

Victor Udoewa, (2022). An introduction to radical participatory design: decolonising participatory design processes. Design Science. 8. 10.1017/dsj.2022.24. [URL](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/design-science/article/an-introduction-to-radical-participatory-design-decolonising-participatory-design-processes/63F70ECC408844D3CD6C1A5AC7D35F4D)