Requirements Engineering for Social Software

The modern Internet world is enriched with social software, often referred to as Web2.0 [O’Rel05]: YouTube, Flickr and FaceBook are some of the most famous examples. Social software bears some special characteristics. One is the shift of the focus from technology to the user. Users increasingly play the central role in the design of such systems. A second characteristic is the self-organization of Web 2.0 technologies. Thereby a “community-software evolution cycle” emerges: A certain amount of people start using a provided social platform, which will initiate the building of a community with certain rules and constrains. The community, in turn, will attract new users to the system and, therefore, change its size and structure. Furthermore, the community members get more experienced in the system over time. These changes result in the establishment of new requirements to the platform from the community side. For a successful community organization, an undefined critical mass of community is always needed. Reaching a critical mass, however, is not a lifetime guarantee – badly managed organizations may chase comers away again, leading to the death of the community. A third special characteristic is the voluntary user participation in his/her community and his/her contribution to it. Here, the question comes up what can attract the user to participate voluntarily and why he/she should be interested in doing so. No concrete formalization of requirements engineering process for social software is established so far. There are numerous emerging Web 2.0 applications, from which only a few successfully managed to build up a community and expand extremely. Unfortunately, the majority of this new generation software never achieves its critical mass and, therefore, dies out sooner or later. The cluster project “Context adaptive interaction in cooperative knowledge processes” (CONTici, www.contici.org) focuses on the design and development of the contextadaptive, cooperative systems, with special support for the groups with dynamically changing needs. In the project part “Traceable Requirements Engineering for Communities of Practice (CoP, [Wen98])” of RWTH Aachen University the processes of requirements identification, traceability and realization for cooperative systems have to be defined. Thereby, the system needs to be adapted to the socio-psychological characteristics and learning processes of the user group. In our research we concentrate on the social software. Social software brings enormous potential for cooperative knowledge processes. Based on the observations stated above regarding user-centeredness, selforganization and voluntarism, it becomes clear that the community and its state are