SlideWiki microservice architecture for collaborative online system development

SlideWiki is an online system for supporting educators and students in collaborative use of OpenCourseWare (OCW). We combine state of the art feature development and academic research to achieve this. Our online, distributed, and open source development of SlideWiki in an academic and multidisciplinary context introduces challenges related to separation of concerns, community development, the co- ordination of geographical distributed researchers and developers, and the variety of preferred and necessary programming languages and run-time environments. We present the SlideWiki microservice architecture that we use for collaborative online system develop- ment, and discuss how it alleviates above challenges. Our study exemplies how a microservice architecture can alleviate challenges in developing and maintaining large-scale socio-technical systems in other academic, open source, multidisciplinary, online, and geo- graphically distributed contexts.