Stakeholder analysis
The people, organisations, and systems with a direct interest in Ekdotico — their needs, their concerns, and the leverage they hold over the project.
Identification
Stakeholders are organised by their relationship to the platform: internal team, primary users, secondary users, vendors, and external regulators. Each is given a stable identifier that is referenced throughout the rest of the documentation.
| ID | Stakeholder | Type | Role |
|---|---|---|---|
| SH-01 | Founder / Product Lead | Internal | Builds, maintains, and makes all product decisions |
| SH-02 | Undergraduate students | External · Primary user | Term papers, essays, group assignments |
| SH-03 | Graduate researchers | External · Primary user | Theses, journal papers, grant proposals |
| SH-04 | Faculty and supervisors | External · Secondary user | Review, co-author, comment on student work |
| SH-05 | University IT administrators | External · Deployer | Self-host institutional instances via Docker |
| SH-06 | University procurement officers | External · Decision-maker | Evaluate and license institutional deployments |
| SH-07 | Open source contributors | External · Community | Submit pull requests for templates, styles, translations |
| SH-08 | Anthropic | External · Vendor | LLM API provider; pricing and rate-limit dependency |
| SH-09 | Clerk | External · Vendor | Authentication provider; session and identity dependency |
| SH-10 | Academic integrity officers | External · Regulator | Verify AI disclosure; check provenance signatures |
| SH-11 | Journal and conference editors | External · Verifier | Validate submitted papers via verify.ekdoti.co |
Power and interest
Power describes a stakeholder's ability to influence the project's direction or viability. Interest describes how directly they are affected by the outcome. The combination determines how much engagement each stakeholder needs.
HIGH POWER │ SH-08 (Anthropic) │ SH-01 (Founder)
│ SH-09 (Clerk) │ SH-06 (Procurement)
│ SH-10 (AI integrity) │ SH-05 (IT admin)
────────────┼───────────────────────┼─────────────────────
LOW POWER │ SH-07 (OSS) │ SH-02 (Undergrad)
│ │ SH-03 (Grad student)
│ │ SH-04 (Faculty)
│ │ SH-11 (Journal editor)
└───────────────────────┴─────────────────────
LOW INTEREST HIGH INTEREST
Needs and concerns
Each stakeholder enters the project with a core need they expect Ekdotico to satisfy, and a key concern that — left unaddressed — would cause them to disengage or oppose adoption. Both are tracked here so that every later design decision can be tested against this list.
| SH | Core need | Key concern |
|---|---|---|
| SH-01 | Sustainable open-core product with institutional traction | Anthropic API cost; technical debt accumulation |
| SH-02 | One tool that removes context-switching from academic writing | Learning curve; institution's AI use policy |
| SH-03 | Research-grade citation integrity with zero hallucination | Data privacy; supervisor compatibility with existing tools |
| SH-04 | Transparent view of the writing process; trackable AI use | AI disclosure; editing traceability |
| SH-05 | Clean Docker deployment with no mandatory external runtime | GDPR compliance; data residency within institution |
| SH-06 | Provable academic integrity features and defensible pricing | Vendor lock-in; long-term product viability |
| SH-10 | Reliable, tamper-evident AI contribution disclosure | False negatives; users gaming the provenance system |
| SH-11 | Simple verification requiring no Ekdotico account | Signature forgery; impersonation of platform |
Engagement strategy
The four high-power stakeholders are managed closely, with direct communication channels and dedicated artifacts in this documentation — the C4 diagram for procurement and IT, the verification API specification for academic integrity officers, and the API and dependency disclosure for vendor relationships.
The high-interest student and faculty groups are engaged through the product itself: onboarding flows, in-app settings, and the public verification site. The low-interest, low-power group of open source contributors is supported through clear contribution pathways documented in the open source strategy.