Supporting Multilevel Incentive Mechanisms in Crowdsourcing Systems: An Artifact-Centric View

Abstract

Crowdsourcing systems of the future (e.g., Social Compute Units — S- CUs, collective adaptive systems) need to support complex collaborative process- es, such as software development. This presupposes deploying ad-hoc assembled teams of human and machine services that actively collaborate and communicate among each other, exchanging different artifacts and jointly processing them. Major challenges in such environments (e.g., team formation, adaptability, runtime man- agement of data-flow and collaboration patterns) can be somewhat alleviated by delegating the responsibility and the know-howneeded for these duties to the partic- ipating crowd members, while indirectly controlling and stimulating them through appropriate incentive mechanisms. Existing process-centric collaboration modeling approaches (e.g., workflows) are incapable of encoding such incentive mechanism- s. Therefore, in this paper we analyze different interaction aspects that incentive mechanisms cover and formulate them as requirements for future systems to sup- port. We then propose an artifact-centric approach for modeling incentives in rich crowdsourcing environments that meets these requirements. Ognjen