Internet-based, large-scale systems provide the technical foundation for massive online collaboration forms such as social networks, crowdsourcing, content sharing, or source code generation. Such systems are typically designed to adapt at the software level to achieve availability and scalability. They, however, remain mostly unaware of the changing requirements of the various ongoing collaborations. As a consequence, cooperative efforts cannot grow and evolve as easily nor efficiently as they need to. An adaptation mechanism needs to become aware of a collaboration’s structure and flexibility to consider changing collaboration requirements during system reconfiguration. To this end, this paper presents the human Architecture Description Language (hADL) for describing the envisioned collaboration dynamics. Inspired by software architecture concepts, hADL introduces human components and collaboration connectors for describing the underlying human coordination dependencies. We further outline a methodology for designing collaboration patterns based on a set of fundamental principles that facilitate runtime adaptation. An exemplary model transformation demonstrates hADL’s feasibility. It produces the group permission configuration for MediaWiki in reaction to changing collaboration conditions.