Is There a Demand of Software Transparency?

Abstract

This paper uses data about bills proposed to the Brazilian Congress to better understand transparency demand. The legislative process starts with bills, proposed by members of congress, which after the discussion on both chambers, may become a law. Webcitizen, a software company, offers to the Brazilian public an internet based software system with which people can vote on bills. This software interface is a site named Votenaweb, which gathers votes and publicize the results. As such, it aims to show how citizens value the proposed bills. Our study identifies bills related to transparency by using non-functional requirements (hereafter, NFRs) of the Transparency Softgoal Interdependency Graph (hereafter, SIG). Based on these results, we argue that there is a real future demand for software transparency, as advocated by previous work on software transparency.