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The emergence of blockchain projects enables new ways of collaboration between untrusted parties. Each of these projects, however , only exists because stakeholders of these projects find common ground. If this common ground is not found, blockchains are forked – organizationally and technically – which endangered major blockchain systems like Bitcoin or Ethereum. To assure the operation of such projects and, thus, to improve their governance, it is crucial to understand their stakeholders. This research conducted a literature review and a survey to (1) identify blockchain stakeholders and to (2) understand their interests as well as underlying motives for their interests. This research has two main contributions: a stakeholder map, which serves as a lens to study stakeholders of public blockchains, and exemplary insights from the application of this lens comprising of 74 survey responses. Consequently, this research provides a novel tool for stakeholder analysis in academia and practice to improve blockchain governance.

The prioritisation of change requests for an evolving software is an important and complex activity in the continuous requirements engineering and release planning of an evolving product. We have explored such prioritisation with an organisation consisting of several business units appearing as stakeholders that compete for the same development resources. The challenge lay in taking objective factors like the cost-benefit ratio and technical dependencies of the requests into account while creating a high level of stakeholder satisfaction with the defined release scope. Together with the organisation, we have designed and implemented a tailored method that uses the stakeholders' satisfaction as a structured means for validating the criteria-based prioritisation results. The paper extends prior work by taking the perspective of the organisational stakeholders and describing the method design from the organisation's perspective, reports the use of the method in the organisation, and summarises the lessons learned from using the method in the organisation. The results are useful to increase the maturity of prioritisation in industrialpractice. © 2021 IEEE.

Cross-kingdom RNA interference (RNAi) is a biological process allowing plants to transfer small regulatory RNAs to invading pathogens to trigger the silencing of target virulence genes. Transient assays in cereal powdery mildews suggest that silencing of one or two effectors could lead to near loss of virulence, but evidence from stable RNAi lines is lacking. We established transient host-induced gene silencing (HIGS) in wheat, and demonstrate that targeting an essential housekeeping gene in the wheat powdery mildew pathogen (Blumeria graminis f. sp. tritici) results in significant reduction of virulence at an early stage of infection. We generated stable transgenic RNAi wheat lines encoding a HIGS construct simultaneously silencing three B.g. tritici effectors including SvrPm3a1/f1, a virulence factor involved in the suppression of the Pm3 powdery mildew resistance gene. We show that all targeted effectors are effectively downregulated by HIGS, resulting in reduced fungal virulence on adult wheat plants. Our findings demonstrate that stable HIGS of effector genes can lead to quantitative gain of resistance without major pleiotropic effects in wheat.