Integrating Crowd Intelligence into Software

The knowledge resources available on the Internet are increasingly being used to support software both at development time and at execution time. These take the form of conventional services as well as human knowledge work both through crowd sourcing and information stored directly on the World Wide Web. But while these resources are vast and rich, they are also unreliable. In this paper, we propose a novel software development pattern called Contributional Implementation (CI) inspired by the way humans mitigate this unreliability: sources are treated as opinion providers with varying amounts of trust and aggregating multiple opinions from different sources helps improve the quality of the answers. We sketch some detailed examples of how a CI could be coded, discuss issues related to the realization of CI´s in practice and outline plans for an evaluation of the approach.