Social networks and crowdsourcing for stakeholder analysis in system of systems projects

In system of systems engineering, stakeholders are individuals, groups or organizations that stand to gain or lose from the success or failure of a system of systems. Systems of systems pose unique problems for stakeholder analysis due to their evolutionary nature, emergent behavior, operational independence, managerial independence, and geographical distribution of their constituent systems. This paper proposes the use of social networks and crowdsourcing to identify and prioritize the stakeholders for system of systems projects. The proposed method crowdsources the stakeholders to recommend other stakeholders, builds a social network of stakeholders, and prioritizes stakeholders using social network measures. The paper describes the method, and discusses the strengths and limitations of applying the method in system of systems projects.