External Influences and Integration as Requirements in Online Community Development

1. External Influences and Integration as Requirements in Online Community Development Lappeenranta University of Technology Laboratory of Software Engineering Erno Vanhala Tommi Kähkönen Uolevi Nikula Kari Smolander

2. Contents • IT trends • Online Community • RE in OC development • Four Sources of Requirements • Integration • Ongoing Project • Design Science

3. Current (and past) trends in IT • Collaboration enabled by the Internet and online communities • Crowdsourcing, open source software development • Increased amount of integration • Web services • APIs (programmableweb.com lists almost 4000 APIs) • Open data, mash-up applications • Increased role of social media • More and more users in Facebook, YouTube and Flickr (Google+) • Applications becoming more social • Mobile applications • Availability on mobile devices • smooth user experience • Numerous different platforms...

4. Online Community • Community = ”a group of individuals who want to interact, develop knowledge, share their experiences and build up their own entity” • 4 key requirements for an online community • Purpose (Why?) • Technology (How?) • People (Whom?) • Content (What?) • A community cannot exist without each! • Community of Practice vs. Community of Interest • Current methods for OC development are slightly outdated!

5. Requirements engineering for Online Communities Developing an OC is different that developing ”traditional” software • Potential users cannot be listed • We cannot interview all the users and ask ”what do you need” • Users are not forced to use the OC • If not satisfied, they leave (e.g. from Facebook to Google+) • Need for superior features • Requirements specification must be extended to consider into internal and external sources of requirement

6. Four sources of requiremets

7. Integration • Using existing resources • APIs, tools, platforms, data, … • in order to save time and money • Different kinds of ways to integrate • Social media integration • E.g. Facebook ”like” –buttons, authentication, publishing on the wall • Data integration • Using data from various sources (Weather, locations, …) • Tools integration • Using e.g. Google analytics to monitor the usage of our OC • Integration as a key requirement when building online communities and other web applications • Determining the right amount of integration! • Is integration possible in current domain, for current users, in current context? • How it is actually implemented? • Is it really useful? • Consideration on semantics

8. Ongoing project • ENPI is an EU project done by collaboration of Finland and Russia • Main goals of ENPI are to… • …implement the online community platform • …integrate meaningful data from existing sources to aid travelers • …integrate the OC platform with social media, e.g. Facebook and Twitter • …output a new model for online community development • Motivation for the project: • Amount of travelers between Russia and Finland is increasing • The key role of social media in online travel information search • Information can be found from various sources, the need to integrate all to one place

9. Design science as a research method • Produces innovative artifacts (constructs, models, methods, prototype systems) • In our case the artifact is the OC platform • Produces knowledge how other instances of this artifact can be produced • In our case, this knowledge is a model for OC development • Makes theoretical contributions and to assist practitioners in problem solving

10. Made any sense? Questions? Comments? Thank you!