Using Social Networks to Crowdsource Stakeholders

Soo Ling Lim from University College (London) will talk on "Using Social Networks to Identify and Prioritise Software Project Stakeholders" at the ANU Department of Computer Science in Canberra, 4pm 14 October 2010. This is a fee talk, no need to book, just turn up.

The research is detailed in "StakeNet: Using social networks to analyse the stakeholders of large-scale software projects" (Soo Ling Lim, Daniele Quercia, and Anthony Finkelstein, 2010).

While the talk is about identifying people important to a software project, the technique might be applied more broadly to business, administration and politics, to find out which people are actually important in making a particular decision, rather than who is notionally in charge.

In his PHD Thesis "Australia's online censorship regime" Peter Chen carried out some quantitative analysis of the relationships between lobby groups involved in the parliamentary inquiries into Internet censorship in the late 1990s. However, with more use of social networking, there should be more data available for such analysis.

Using Social Networks to Identify and Prioritise Software Project Stakeholders

Soo Ling Lim (University College, London)

COMPUTER SCIENCE SEMINAR

DATE: 2010-10-14
TIME: 16:00:00 - 17:00:00
LOCATION: CSIT Seminar Room, N101, Computer Science and Information Technology Building, The Australian National University, Canberra
CONTACT: Chris.Johnson@anu.edu.au

ABSTRACT:
Many software projects fail because they overlook stakeholders or involve the wrong representatives of significant groups. Unfortunately, existing methods in stakeholder analysis are likely to omit stakeholders, and consider all stakeholders as equally influential.

To address the problems, we have developed StakeNet, a method that uses social networks to identify and prioritise stakeholders. StakeNet identifies an initial set of stakeholders and asks them to recommend other stakeholders, builds a social network whose nodes are stakeholders and links are recommendations, and prioritises the stakeholders using a variety of social network algorithms.

To evaluate StakeNet, we apply it to a large software project to develop an access control system for 30,000 users. Results show that StakeNet identifies a highly complete list of stakeholders, and prioritises the stakeholders accurately.

We have also developed StakeSource, a software tool that automates the manual processes in StakeNet (_www.stakesource.co.uk _). StakeSource is now used in major software projects in UK and Japan.

This talk describes the StakeNet method and its evaluation, and demonstrates the StakeSource tool.

BIO:
Soo Ling is a Research Associate at the Department of Computer Science, University College London. Her research investigates the use of social networks and collaborative filtering techniques in requirements engineering.