SlideWiki microservice architecture for collaborative online system development

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