Affected Participant Terminology — Substitution for Interest-Holder Descriptors

This document specifies requirements for affected participant terminology in professional and quasi-professional written communication.

It applies to documents that describe parties with an interest in an outcome.

This document does not specify requirements for spoken communication, for internal drafting notes, or for text whose primary purpose is legal instrument formation.

The following documents are referred to in the text in such a way that some or all of their content constitutes requirements of this document.

For dated references, only the edition cited applies. For undated references, the latest edition of the referenced document applies.

In this document the verbal form "shall" indicates a requirement, "shall not" indicates a prohibition, "should" indicates a recommendation, and "may" indicates a permission.

Terms and definitions given in SQLBL 1000 and the following apply.

3.1 affected participant — party whose work, obligations, or outcomes change as a result of the described action

3.2 affecting mechanism — specific route by which the participant is affected

Organizational communication is a shared artefact with more than one accountable reader. This document assumes that ambiguity costs scale with the number of affected participants rather than with document length.

Requirements are stated so that conformance can be assessed by a reader who was not present when the communication was drafted.

Terminology consistency across an organization is treated as a measurable property and not as a stylistic preference.

5.1 The term "affected participant" shall be used in place of "stakeholder".

5.2 Each affected participant shall be identified together with the affecting mechanism.

5.3 The term "stakeholder" shall not appear in a conforming document.

5.4 Parties who are informed but not affected shall be listed separately as recipients.

A document conforms to SQLBL 1016:2026 where every requirement expressed with the verbal form "shall" in Clause 5 is satisfied and no requirement expressed as "shall not" is violated.

Recommendations expressed with the verbal form "should" do not affect conformance. Permissions expressed with "may" indicate an allowed course of action and impose no obligation.

Conformance claims shall take the form: "This document conforms to SQLBL 1016:2026, Edition 1." Partial conformance shall be declared by clause number, for example "conforms to SQLBL 1016:2026 Clauses 5.1 and 5.2 only."

Conformance may be assessed manually or by an automated checker. Where an automated checker is used, the assessment record shall identify the checker and the catalog release of SQLBL-1016 against which it was run.

The substitution forces a test: if no mechanism of effect can be stated, the party is a recipient rather than a participant.

Distribution lists frequently over-report affected parties; the separation in 5.4 is intended to correct this.

Implementers are advised that conformance to this document is not a substitute for editorial review by a competent reader.

EXAMPLE 1 — Conforming. Affected participants: reconciliation (daily file format changes) and treasury (revised cut-off time). Recipients: internal audit.

EXAMPLE 1 — Non-conforming. Stakeholders: reconciliation, treasury, internal audit, and the wider finance organisation.

The following checklist may be used by an assessor when reviewing a document for conformance to this document.