[LINK] Using Social Networks to Crowdsource Stakeholders

[Tom Worthington]

Soo Ling Lim <http://soolinglim.wordpress.com/> 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: <http://cecs.anu.edu.au/seminars/more/SID/2683>.

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): 
<http://go2.wordpress.com/?id=725X1342&site=soolinglim.wordpress.com&url=http%3A%2F%2Fsoolinglim.files.wordpress.com%2F2010%2F07%2Fstakenet_icse2010.pdf&sref=http%3A%2F%2Fsoolinglim.wordpress.com%2Fpublications%2F>.

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: 
<http://dtl.unimelb.edu.au/R/R46F2DRUGA77SHFV3RIIL25UX1K9K5PKE6M1XTYTING9XII5TH-01031?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=65881&pds_handle=GUEST>.

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     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 at 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.
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-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, The
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/