Requirements Engineering for Social Computing

RESC workshop @RE11 panel

Eric YuUniversity of Toronto

August 29, 2011

How do you understand social computing (SC): what's new about it?

All computing is social !??If people are involved in usage, development, maintenance, evolution, …Behaviour results from role, position, and individual person.

SC highlights the individualTraditional information systems are mostly role-centric.

Network effectWeb-scale…but SC in enterprise (E2.0) is a blend

Varying proportions/combination of role- and person-based

Even public open web SC can be role-centric (self-selected or attributed)

Eg- wikipedia – editor, contributor, spoiler, …

What is special about requirements engineering (RE) for SC?

Recent phenomena .: don’t have that much experience about it, guess work, intuition, - a few spectacular successes, but many failures

cf Facebook vs mySpace, now Google+ weibo.cn combines features of twitter & Fb

ERE even more important :.not relying on established practices,

eg motivations unknown/untapped. huge volume of data that can be analyzed

unlike enterprise IS, but SC can still be for enterprise ..E2.0 can use BI, beyond usual elicitation

mass-market (but cf E2.0) often rely on visionary innovation, not incremental advance.  Therefore need different RE methods

Disruptive innovation  [Samavi] Incremental change

Give three research challenges for RE for SC

Intentionality, still ERE modeling

community, trust, power, identity, ...

social dynamics - dynamic versions of above concepts

social concepts even more important, behaviour less constrained then in organizational IS

Market dynamics (large numbers)Some kind of quantificationClustering to determine classes of actorsEcosystems – actors (classes) react to each other

Collect experiences, extract lessons, codify into reusable experience

hard to discern effects of RE methods vs other factors.

From where do we get the inspiration and insights for addressing them?

Disruptive innovations – e.g., [Clayton Christensen]

Evidence based, research based – e.g., collect design knowhow  

Agile practices – empirical studies [Chiniforooshin] For specialized domain of social media for participatory democracy [Hilts GODKL]  

Tools fair tomorrow in iStar11 workshop

Use BI, relate to intentionality, e.g., [BIM]

GO-DKL Browser• Associate one’s project objectives with

knowledge base (KB) goals:– KB contains intentional relationships extracted from

scholarly publications.• Build a project model of included KB goals and

contributing design features

• Explore and analyze tree-list representation of goal model

• Reconfigure project model relationships to suit individual project context

• Export Q7 files that can be imported into OpenOME.GO-DKL Browser project model reconfiguaration and Q7 file export.

Andrew HiltsEric YuFaculty of InformationUniversity of Toronto