Scenario:

Our sponsoring organization wants an "internet sandbox" in which they can test influence theories and practices using social media, news media, and other online applications that reach target populations. If successful, this system could revolutionize how the sponsor conducts marketing and shares information aimed at shaping opinions within target audiences globally. They need common applications like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube as well as at least 6 common RSS News feeds for outlets like BBC, Reuters, CNN, and Aljazeera; conservative and liberal news should be balanced. Also, to make the system fully useful, it should possess an email application similar to Gmail (all social media applications require an email address to register and set up user accounts), and should offer the users the ability to mimic a given segment of any society (e.g., age, gender, race, economic status', etc) with clearly defined sentiments for specific topics or themes like religion, corporations, East vs Western orientations, etc).

The system should have the ability to "scrape" content from existing social media from defined demographic regions and should enable the RSS news feeds to draw from current (i.e., real-time) news online. What will make this system unique is that it should possess an AI capability to generate responses to news and social media posts based on the predefined sentiment tendencies. To simulate dissident groups that may attempt to spread disinformation, an ability to generate personas that can replicate false messaging traffic volumes is needed.

The Sponsor does not expect to be involved in every little decision regarding how the system is built. However, they made it clear that they will be available to consult and make decisions on functionality issues, requirements, and options on any given day. They also expect to be involved during functionality testing as the various applications mature during development. The development team is highly experienced in the range of programming skills needed to duplicate the API's and create realistic applications that will effectively mimic the real internet with few exceptions. The most challenging aspect of this development project will be the sentiment engine involving an AI capability.

The sponsor does expect the various applications to mirror that actual social media and news apps, so keeping the apps up-todate will be important. Also, the sponsor routinely holds exercises where marketing and influence campaigns are evaluated. These may offer excellent opportunities to test groups of apps in the system during development before final delivery.

Senior sponsor acceptance and support *Buy-in: Do stakeholders trust that team can deliver? *Trust: Will team be able to make decisions locally on how to work? *Decision-making: Yes Yes Yes Partial s Probably s Probably 5 No 10 Unlikely 10 Unlikely 10