Continuous Adaptation Management in Collective Intelligence Systems

Collective Intelligence Systems (CIS), such as wikis and social networks, enable enhanced knowledge creation and sharing at organization and society levels. From our experience in R&D projects with industry partners and in-house CIS development, we learned that these platforms go through a complex evolution process. A particularly challenging aspect in this respect represents uncertainties that can appear at any time in the life-cycle of such systems. A prominent way to deal with uncertainties is adaptation, i.e., the ability to adjust or reconfigure the system in order to mitigate the impact of the uncertainties. However, there is currently a lack of consolidated design knowledge of CIS-specific adaptation and methods for managing it. To support software architects, we contribute an architecture viewpoint for continuous adaptation management in CIS, aligned with ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010. We evaluated the viewpoint in a case study with a group of eight experienced engineers. The results show that the viewpoint is well-structured, useful and applicable, and that its model kinds cover well the scope to handle different CIS-specific adaptation problems.