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The domain of rural areas, including rural communities, agriculture, and forestry, is going through a process of deep digital transformation. Digitalisation can have positive impacts on sustainability in terms of greater environmental control, and community prosperity. At the same time, it can also have disruptive effects, with the marginalisation of actors that cannot cope with the change. When developing a novel system for rural areas, requirements engineers should carefully consider the specific socio-economic characteristics of the domain, so that potential positive effects can be maximised, while mitigating negative impacts.

The goal of this paper is to support requirements engineers with a reference catalogue of drivers, barriers and potential impacts associated to the introduction of novel ICT solutions in rural areas.

To this end, we interview 30 cross-disciplinary experts in digitalisation of rural …