Middleware for social computing: a roadmap

TLDR: This work identifies three societal grand challenges that are likely to drive future research in social computing and elaborate on how the middleware community can help address them.

Abstract: Social computing broadly refers to supporting social behaviours using computational systems. In the last decade, the advent of Web 2.0 and its social networking services, wikis, blogs, and social bookmarking has revolutionised social computing, creating new online contexts within which people interact socially (social networking). With the pervasiveness of mobile devices and embedded sensors, we stand at the brink of another major revolution, where the boundary between online and offline social behaviours blurs, providing opportunities for (re)defining social conventions and contexts once again. But opportunities come with challenges: can middleware foster the engineering of social software? We identify three societal grand challenges that are likely to drive future research in social computing and elaborate on how the middleware community can help address them.