The ���Wisdom of the Crowd Pattern���: A Person-centric data aggregation approach for Social Software Peter Lachenmaier, Florian Ott Cooperation Systems Center Munich, Bundeswehr University Munich {Peter.Lachenmaier, Florian.Ott}@kooperationssysteme.de 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. Keywords: CommunityMashup, Aggregation, Person- centricity, Data Integration 1. Motivation Different studies over the last years have shown that Social Networking Services like Facebook or Microblogging tools like Twitter are currently changing the way we are using the Web (e.g. [1]). Individual content sharing and social collaboration are becoming the most important activities [2]. In conjunction with the intensive use of activity streams the interconnectedness of people and content gains in importance. Web 2.0 platforms as well as their counterparts in organizational contexts (Enterprise 2.0) have emerged from prevailing content integration services to systems that support human relationships, and provide a technical foundation for inter-person-integration. Thus, one main difference in comparison to earlier research in the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) where content was the central element (e.g. [3]) is the recent focus on individuals and their activities [4]. In contrast to earlier Groupware Social Software mainly relies on the individual visibility of people���s activities around content instead of detached information objects. Wiki pages, blog posts and status updates in Social Networks or microblogging platforms are popular representatives of this new individual related information objects in Social Software. By reconnecting content to the corresponding authors, and thereby giving them a visible ���natural��� identity, Social Software increases awareness, and leads to better socio-technical integration [5]. Awareness as information about the activities of (potential) interaction partners plays an important role for efficient collaboration. In general, awareness can be defined as ���an understanding of the activities of others, which provides a context for your own activities��� [6]. As one of the key success factors of the Web 2.0 is to make the individual activities of people transparent for friends, followers or other groups of interest, Social Software can on the one hand help to increase awareness. On the other hand we are facing a specialization of different social services. Most of them have measurable benefit for their users with a broad reach and large amount of users in general. But they also have their own identity management and thereby their own user base, although the people using these platforms have only one ���natural��� identity. This leads to situations where people are using different social services depending on the desired task or the group of other people they want to share information with. Even if they do not want to use several services, they are forced to for staying informed about the activities of all persons they are interested in. The missing support for content sharing across different services results in redundant cross-posts distributed via different services or platforms to reach a desired group of people. In order to benefit from the better awareness support of Social Software without having to post and / or consume information redundantly in different platforms we are facing the need for a flexible data integration solution that enables the aggregation of data from different social services. One of the most important characteristics of such an integration solution is that it 706 IEEE IRI 2012, August 8-10, 2012, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA 978-1-4673-2284-3/12/$31.00 ��2012 IEEE