The “Wisdom of the Crowd Pattern”: A person-centric data aggregation approach for social software

Abstract

Driven by the success of Social Software in private and enterprise settings (Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0) a lot of specialized services have moved mainstream over the last few years. Thus, the number of services one single person uses in cooperative settings for different dedicated purposes, e.g. joint document editing, group calendars, microblogs or Social Networking Services (SNS) has highly increased. One problem of that development is that the distribution of digital activities over different platforms and services makes it hard to stay informed about the activities of others because of their technical separation. As exactly this kind of awareness information is one of the key features of Social Software, because it allows implicit coordination for cooperative work settings this leads to the demand of a flexible data integration solution for social services. In this paper we describe our person-centric data integration approach that is aligned to the special characteristics of data from Social Software. It is inspired by the way humans are collaborating in the social web and therefore called "Wisdom of the Crowd Pattern". This approach is technically implemented and integrated in the CommunityMashup.