The 4th international workshop on social software engineering (SSE'11)

Software is created by people and for people. People are heterogeneous in their beliefs, backgrounds, and preferences. Accommodating and exploiting the social variety is crucial for successful engineering and usage of software. On the one hand, software engineering is a social activity, performed by different individuals and teams. This necessitates methodologies and tools to deal with issues such as communication, coordination, knowledge sharing, compensation, and reconciliation. On the other hand, Social Software (Internet Forums, Wikis, Social Networks, Blogs, etc.) is an expanding computing paradigm, which inherently incorporates intensive social interactions and implications. Engineering Social Software magnifies a spectrum of challenges like group requirements engineering, social-awareness, privacy, security, and trust. Both directions -- engineering Social Software and treating software engineering as a social activity -- require competency from other disciplines as diverse as psychology, sociology, and organizational science. While both directions receive considerable attention, research in both fields is fragmented, uncoordinated, and partially redundant. The goal of this workshop is to confluence the research on social aspects in software engineering and engineering of Social software into a new field of Social Software Engineering (SSE).