Meta-Modelling Kindness

Kindness is a psycho-social phenomenon that is also recognized as an important pro-social behaviour. The use of digital technology provides opportunities to promote kindness in various ways, such as in social media campaigns and online communities. In principle, software engineers are well positioned to develop automated systems that can facilitate software-mediated kindness. However, in practice, incorporating kindness concerns explicitly in the development and use of software systems is challenging: kindness is highly context dependent, affected by a range of factors such as intentions and opportunity. In this paper, we explore systematic ways in which kindness concerns can be considered by software engineers. We propose a novel meta-model that captures essential entities and relations associated with kindness. The meta-model enables the representation of possible instances or opportunities for performing acts of kindness, by considering the actors involved (such as giver, receiver, and observer), their psychological and social attributes that promote kindness (such as emotional states and social relatedness), the acts needed to fulfil kindness opportunities (such as motivation, ability, and timeliness), and other contextual factors (such as location and time). Our meta-model is demonstrated through two software application scenarios that enable charitable donations and kindness in business. Overall, our proposal offers a first, tentative, but concrete step towards enabling kind computing, and promoting kindness in software systems.