Bridging the Gap: Participatory Modeling for Stakeholder-Driven NoSQL Database Design

Collaborative development is becoming crucial and widespread across various sectors. When teams of experts come together to develop ideas, designs, models, implementations, projects, and systems, the collaborative process significantly boosts performance and ensures superior results. Participatory modeling (PM) is a methodology that promotes stakeholder involvement, combines research and knowledge, fosters trust and consensus, and enhances cross-disciplinary collaboration to tackle complex problems. Applying participatory modeling to NoSQL database design meets a critical need for addressing both organizational and human aspects, as well as their practical implementations in database design. In this paper, we introduce the ongoing development of the BRIDGE framework (Bi-directional Real-time Interactive Design Gateway for Engagement), a participatory approach for NoSQL database design. BRIDGE incorporates dynamic, two-way feedback loops within an interactive, real-time platform, making the design process more fluid and responsive. This framework not only deepens stakeholder engagement, but also improves the flexibility and clarity of database models, ensuring they cater to the varied and changing needs of businesses. With BRIDGE, stakeholders are actively involved as co-designers, directly shaping the development path to enhance both functionality and performance. Given that the NoSQL ecosystem requires varied layers of expertise, and is driven by industry guidelines and best practices, a stakeholder-driven approach encompassing all perspectives, requirements, and needs, could potentially offer a novel method to approach NoSQL database design.