New tools for conviviality. Masks, norms, ontology, requirements and measures. Bridging the conviviality gap between policy and informatics

The notion of conviviality has an intuitive meaning for human society, which is to feel welcome in a community and at ease with its members. We believe it also has particular significance for the design of artificial social systems. Traditionally conviviality has been shown to be useful in human interactions, thus the abundance of artificial social systems is likely to benefit from its application. In this thesis, we explore the possibility of developing the concept of conviviality in artificial social systems in depth. We provide a number of tools to help designers of artificial social systems to include conviviality at the onset of their design. First, we identify what we believe to constitute a promising field of research. Second, we abstract the notion of conviviality. Starting from the philosophical notion proposed by Illich, “individual freedom realized in personal interdependence”. Using Taylor’s intuition about a conviviality mask, we advance a formalization in terms of interdependence of agents and their goals, and the social norms that determine that interdependence. Third, we operationalize conviviality for the development of artificial social systems. We establish correspondence between software engineering and social science domains. We formalize the interdependence between members of a group with dependence networks, and use the stakeholder-agent concept to pro- vide individual agents’ points of view. Fourth, we propose a way to elicit conviviality requirements during the early phase of the development of artificial social systems, using the Tropos agent methodology. Finally, we provide a glimpse of the type of conviviality properties that can be measured in artificial social systems, and thus define the convivial quality of the system. Throughout this thesis we illustrate our arguments with two running examples, one from Second Life, the other from the city of Luxembourg.