Winbook: A social networking based framework for collaborative requirements elicitation and WinWin negotiations

Easy-to-use groupware for diverse stakeholder negotiation has been a continuing challenge [7, 8, 9]. USC's fifth-generation wiki-based win-win negotiation support tool [1] was not as successful in improving over the previous four generations [2] as hoped - it encountered problems with non-technical stakeholder usage. The popularity of Facebook and Gmail ushered in a new era of widely-used social networking capabilities that I have been using to develop and experiment with a new way for collaborative requirements elicitation and management - marrying the way people collaborate on Facebook and organize their emails on Gmail to come up with a social networking-like platform to help achieve better usage of the WinWin negotiation framework [4]. Initial usage results on 14 small projects involving non-technical stakeholders have shown profound implications on the way requirements are negotiated and used, through the system and software definition and development processes. Subsequently, Winbook has also been adopted as a part of a project to bridge requirements and architecting for a major US government organization.