A Transformative Software Development Framework: Reflecting the paradigm shift in social computing

Social computing and networking has caused a dramatic evolution in the way people collaborate and interact via the Internet. Essentially, social computing represents the collection of technologies that gather, process, compute, and visualize social information. This new social structure has emerged creating an array of loosely integrated social components. However, a paradigm shift is needed to adopt a social computing model that enables the social aspects of Web 2.0 and other social computing technologies to be viewed as individual systems. These systems would then have the ability to integrate in a variety of new ways that enhances the user experience like never before. This problem can be solved by applying a system of systems framework, which treats each component as a separate system. Each system communicates as a set of defined processes with specific inputs and outputs. This creates a collection of social computing systems that are easily reusable and scalable reducing the complexity involved in integrating these systems. The Transformative (Interdisciplinary) Software Development Framework defines a process for building a system as a collection of sub- or meta- systems. In this paper we apply the Transformative Software Development Framework to social computing. A prototype, SpiderWeb was developed to reflect a paradigm shift by defining, modeling, and building a social computing prototype using system of systems engineering.