Elements of software ecosystem early-stage design for collective intelligence systems
Juergen Musil, Angelika Musil, Stefan Biffl · 2013
User-contribution driven software service platforms like crowdsourcing and social media services represent an efficient way of aggregating and distributing knowledge. However, only little research has been reported on early-stage design of software ecosystems (SECOs) for software service platforms, in particular in the collective intelligence (CI) domain. In this work we analyze needs for CI-centered SECOs leading to new research challenges. We have identified self-organization and feedback mechanisms as essential characteristics in CI-centered SECOs and thus introduce design elements for structuring them properly at an early stage of design. We discuss the concept with a real-world use case from a widely used CI-centered SECO, Wikipedia. A major result is the successful mapping of the design elements to the specific SECO elements.