On Adoption of Social Computing in the Engineering Community

Social computing capabilities can harness the collaborative potential of many individuals, resulting in an outcome that no single individual would have been able to produce on their own. These capabilities are seeing widespread adoption in the consumer space. However, the motivations and the impediments to contribution in the consumer space do not necessarily translate into the enterprise space. In this work we investigate the adoption of social computing capabilities in an engineering setting in the enterprise. Our goals were to identify the opportunities for social computing in the enterprise as well as the barriers for its adoption; we review key concerns, or barriers, for adoption of social computing in this environment, and the potential approaches we have identified to mitigate these adoption barriers.