Workshop Overview

Extended Submission Deadline: June 19th, 2015

Over the past several decades, we have experienced tremendous growth in new infrastructure, business practices, products and services that use information to achieve stakeholder goals. Laws and regulations from governments impose compliance challenges for the requirements engineers that build and maintain these information systems, including: balancing privacy and security, patient medical records, corporate governance, and ambiguity stemming from evolving regulations, technologies, and societies. Regulators, lawyers, engineers, and academics must address these challenges through a shared pursuit to understand the historical and social impact of laws and regulations on emerging technology. Importantly, these challenges are both expensive and continuing. Regulatory compliance must be maintained and monitored throughout the life of regulated information systems.

The eighth RELAW workshop is a multi-disciplinary, one-day workshop that will bring together practitioners and researchers from two domains: Requirements Engineering and Law. Participants from government, industry, and academic sectors investigate challenges to ensure that information systems comply with policies and laws. The workshop will examine critical compliance concerns, including the processes for identifying relevant policies, laws, and jurisdictions, aligning system requirements with laws and regulations, managing changes in requirements or in the law, and demonstrating regulatory compliance through evidence-based mechanisms such as documentation, testing and certification, even in the presence of uncertainty. This year, we will also explicitly focus on mechanisms for improving communication between the requirements engineering and legal communities. To address emerging IT challenges in today’s regulatory environment, RELAW will accept research papers submitted in two general categories: (1) research or experience papers up to ten pages in length and (2) industrial or government problem statements between four and six pages in length. More detailed information is available on our Call for Papers.

Theme: Requirements For Lawyers; Requirements From Lawyers

The RELAW workshop fosters discussion related to requirements engineering resulting from the need to build software systems that comply with laws, regulations, and policy documents. The theme this year is “Requirements For Lawyers; Requirements From Lawyers”. This theme highlights ways to improve communication and feedback from these critical communities. What can lawyers and policy makers do to ease the burdens of establishing and demonstrating compliance? What can requirements engineers do to assist lawyers and policy makers seeking to craft implementable, easily understood laws and regulations? The workshop will bring together practitioners and researchers from auditing, accounting, law, software and requirements engineering. The goals of this workshop include, but are not limited to:

• Developing methods compliance requirements; for monitoring regulatory
• Identifying and managing sources of uncertainty in legal compliance;
• Standardizing vocabulary, terms and modeling concepts from multiple disciplines;
• Improving communication between and aligning processes within requirements engineering and law; and
• Identifying unsolved research and industry challenges and validation objectives for proposed solutions.

Attendance and Format

The workshop will bring together practitioners and researchers from auditing, accounting, law, software and requirements engineering. This workshop is open to the public. The workshop format will consist of presentations of papers and breakout sessions.

NEW in 2015: Best Paper Award

For the first time in RELAW's history, we plan to award a Best Paper award as a result of the review process. This award will be announced at the workshop during the summary discussion.

Colophon

The header image of Ottawa's Parliament Buildings is remixed with permission from Dennis Jarvis, and the original can be found on Flickr.