Software as a Social System

A Social System is “the patterned series of interrelationships existing between individuals, groups, and institutions and forming a coherent whole“.

Are software artefacts social systems? Do they exist by themselves or do they result from the appropriation by their users?

During the cold war an engineering artefact was particularly relevant for the world geopolitics, rockets. Nations competed to master this technology. Therefore, they kept secret their knowledge on how to build rockets. Now, suppose that a country was able to obtain that knowledge, either because it was able to capture a rocket or a scientist, and proceeded to produce their own rockets, (S-systems) see Software as Art and Engineering. In this case they would be able to produce a similar rocket, though it may be less accurate due a poor implementation.

Surprisingly, or not, often software architects are happy, and proud, to describe their artefacts. See, for instance, theTwitter and GitHub blogs. Why? Because they know their artefacts are social systems and cannot be copied.

Suppose that someone tries to copy Facebook. Facebook has a set of functionalities, where posting messages is on of the most popular, an internal domain structure, where facebook users are connected through the friend relation, and very demanding performance and availability requirements, to support the interactions of over one billion people. Probably, the “copiers” would succeed, they would get a software artefact with Facebook-like functionalities. But, would they succeed to copy Facebook? Would they get an artefact where one billion people establish patterned relationships? No, definitely not, because Facebook is a social system.

The social aspects of software artefacts are strongly related with E-systems, when an artefact succeeds it changes the real world, and raises new problems, and business opportunities, which cannot be solved by repeating the same strategies.

Due to the social system characteristic of software, software engineers need to consider the social aspects as intrinsic to the software artefact.