Democratic mass participation of users in Requirements Engineering?

A large part of Requirements Engineering is concerned with involving system users, capturing their needs, and getting their feedback. As users are becoming more and more demanding, markets and technologies are evolving fast, and systems are getting more and more individual, a broad and systematic user involvement in Requirements Engineering is becoming more important than ever. This paper presents the idea of pushing user involvement in Requirements Engineering to its extreme by systematically delegating the responsibility for developing the requirements and deciding about future releases to the crowd of users. We summarize the pros and cons of this vision, its main challenges, and sketch promising solution concepts, which have been proposed and used in E-Participation and E-Democracy. We discussed our vision with ten experts from the fields of Requirements Engineering, politics, psychology, and market research, who were partly supportive partly skeptical.