Towards a research agenda for enterprise crowdsourcing

Abstract

Over the past few years the crowdsourcing paradigm has evolved from its humble beginnings as isolated purpose-built initiatives, such as Wikipedia and Elance and Mechanical Turk to a growth industry employing over 2 million knowledge workers, contributing over half a billion dollars to the digital economy. Web 2.0 provides the technological foundations upon which the crowdsourcing paradigm evolves and operates, enabling networked experts to work collaboratively to complete a specific task. Enterprise crowdsourcing poses interesting challenges for both academic and industrial research along the social, legal, and technological dimensions. In this paper we describe the challenges that researchers and practitioners face when thinking about various aspects of enterprise crowdsourcing. First, to establish technological foundations, what are the interaction models and protocols between the Enterprise and the crowd. Secondly, how is crowdsourcing going to face the challenges in quality assurance, enabling Enterprises to optimally leverage the scalable workforce. Thirdly, what are the novel (Web) applications enabled by Enterprise crowdsourcing. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.