Social threats and the new challenges for Requirements Engineering

We understand social computing as a paradigm based on abstractions that describe how social actors-humans and organizations-interact to conduct their business. These abstractions are part of a social layer that lies on top of the technical layers that constitute software systems. This social layer is founded upon social concepts such as agent, role, commitment, delegation, trust, and reputation. Social computing is affected by many of the threats we successfully handle in our lives: business transactions with unknown parties, volatile environments, existence and enforcement of norms that regulate the marketplace, malicious actors, etc. These threats pose new challenges for Requirements Engineering (RE): the specification of artefacts able to deal with these threats. In this vision paper (i) we argue for the social nature of the threats; and (ii) we outline some of these new challenges for RE.