A gradual approach to crowd-based requirements engineering: The case of conference online social networks

This paper proposes a gradual approach to crowd-based requirements engineering (RE) for supporting the establishment of a more engaged crowd, hence, mitigating the low involvement risk in crowd-based RE. Our approach advocates involving micro-crowds (MCs), where in each micro-crowd, the population is relatively cohesive and familiar with each other. Using this approach, the evolving product is developed iteratively. At each iteration, a new MC can join the already established crowd to enhance the requirements for the next version, while adding terminology to an evolving folksonomy. We are currently using this approach in an on-going research project to develop an online social network (OSN) for academic researchers that will facilitate discussions and knowledge sharing around conferences.