In this Lightning Talk we want to present “Requirements Bazaar 2.0” that aims to be a social continuous innovation platform to bring developers and end-users together. In years of research we have developed and actually operated an open innovation platform for gathering requirements for prototypes in large international academic projects. The last version of the current product is available under http://requirements-bazaar.org . End-users can enter their requirements by providing short descriptions including user stories, screenshots and other images. The requirements can then be shared amongst its users. On the other side of the chain, developers may take up ideas and transfer the accepted requirements to an issue system like JIRA.

Over the last years it turned out that people want more lightweight and mobile-friendly tools; we found the old monolithic system to be very hard to maintain to add new features. Therefore we are currently redeveloping it from scratch integrating many ideas from our users and incorporating new research findings. We are further driven by a mobile-first approach to support a wide variety of devices. We additionally want to support various social features like sharing on social networks or blogs and allowing discussions and rating amongst end-users and developers.

At FOSDEM we would like to encourage open source developers in rethinking the way requirements are currently gathered from the crowd. How do we want to collect new software ideas or simply feature requests from our users. Will it really be through feedback forms in our apps’ “About” menu? Do our users really think in terms of issues like we developers do? How can gamification be used to reward actual end-users of software? We hope Requirements Bazaar can answer these questions and fill the gap!