Social software is an emerging interdisciplinary field devoted to the design and analysis of social procedures. This new field has recently gained the attention of a wide range of research communities, including computer scientists, game theorists and philosophers. The main idea behind social software is that constructing and verifying social procedures should be pursued as systematically as computer software is pursued by computer scientists.

Although the analogy between computer software and social software is strong, there are some important differences. For example, two issues which are important for an analysis of social procedures but less crucial for computer software are the exchange of (and occasional hiding of) information, and the provision of incentives. Concurrency theory, cryptography and distributed computing have all addressed the first issue. However, many of the underlying assumptions in these fields make applying these results to social procedures unrealistic. The second issue has been more or less the province of game theory. But game theory tends to study the area in rather simple terms lacking the sophisticated tools of computer science such as modularization or data types. In this talk, we will provide an introduction to social software through a
number of illustrative examples and discuss how logic can be used to reason about social procedures.