IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Winter 2013 - 11

in particular, two prerequisites. First, the step must be
easily automated, e.g., with standardized interfaces.
Second, a generic task definition is required that fits
most crowd consumer needs. Table I indicates that
from the popular and listed crowdsourcing platforms
only AMT can provide both prerequisites.

auction-based task market approach. Furthermore,
CaaS features the following design principles.

Separation of Concerns and Self-Management:
Clearly defined roles and an IT-aided management of role rights, resources, and tasks guarantees sound interactions, anticipation of resource
■ Ease-of-Use describes the user friendliness in
shortages, and the timely completion of tasks.
interacting with the platform from both perspecInformation hiding relieves management from
tives. Consumers desire their tasks to be defined
many potential failure sources and protects
and offered quickly. Also, the result
members from excessive information
Observations
must be easily retrievable. Producers,
overload.
■ Misbehavior Compensation: Onin contrast, prefer comfortably filtered
influence
and browsable task lists containing
line behavioral observation of resources
selection
only tasks that match their current
and of updates to created profiles
strategies, bid
search profile. In the case of AMT,
enables management to make betinvitations,
consumers of the platforms are offered
ter decisions. Observations influence
the simple and necessary means to
selection strategies, bid invitations, and
and the final
state their tasks and then await results.
the final assignment strategies.
assignment
■ Quality Management: The main
However, both YA and wikipedia prostrategies.
ceed automatically through a review
self-management policies must aim for
process by other workers to verify the
quality assurance. This includes the
quality of the result. On all platforms, providers
goal of retaining recurring and regular members,
are easily overwhelmed by a multitude of availtraining new members, and constantly improvable tasks. In YA and wikipedia the task type
ing the skills of the others for a future-proof skill
remains the same, however, finding the most
evolution. In return, profit increases because the
appropriate and best fitting task is a major issue
platform can abandon low-price, simple tasks and
for the providers of AMT as related work confocus on high-quality, complex tasks.
firms [5].
■ Social Profiles. Crowdsourcing platforms mainMany recently installed markets, such as energy or
tain social profiles along with capability profiles.
pollution permit markets, are based on auctions. There
The advantage of this is that when consumers offer
are many different types of auctions and CaaS relies
tasks requiring multiple capabilities and capacities,
on a custom-built mechanism tailored to the needs
there can be task splits requiring the producers'
of crowdsourcing. CaaS employs a market-based
collaboration to process a final result. At present
approach that uses auctions in order to implement
only YA maintains buddy lists for its members.
these design principles. Auctions are a very old idea
■ Automated Management allows handling the
originally used by the Babylonians, but they are still
growing number of crowdsourcing platforms.
an active area of research. The rise of e-commerce
AMT, YA, and wikipedia, each provide some
has drastically increased the number and diversity of
minor automation with respect to handling task
goods traded via auctions.
loads. The future challenge for crowdsourcing
Fig. 1 shows the architecture of the auction-based
platforms is, nevertheless, to build on a manCaaS platform and the interactions of its members who
agement that goes beyond the current primitive
participate in transactions. within a particular transacforms and includes and combines all the other
tion a member can either adopt the role of producer or
stated requirements.
consumer. CaaS offers specified interfaces for both players. A new transaction is created by the consumer who
Design of the CaaS Platform
offers a task containing a Task Description. Based on that
The CaaS platform aims to provide a task-based
description, CaaS uses a matching algorithm to identify
crowdsourcing platform that accounts for the aforea number of suitable producers. This suitability is commentioned requirements. It offers simple and stanputed based on the profile each producer provides to the
dardized interfaces for both task-producers and
platform and historical data describing the producer's
task-consumers and can be used for workflow inteperformance. The identified producers are issued Invitagration and outsourcing.
tion to participate in an auction. If the producer is interCaaS is able to perform many management tasks
ested in performing the task it submits a Bid to CaaS.
automatically, which have to be done manually
Based on the bid's price and the suitability of the
in other systems. The basis for these features is an
worker, a ranking is created. CaaS then assigns the
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Winter 2013