In conjunction with the 7th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing December 8-11, 2014, London, UK

Crowdsourcing and Gamification are current trends which could significantly profit from elastic and highly scalable cloud infrastructures. Both are inter-disciplinary research domains engaging people voluntarily in arbitrary complex tasks. Crowdsourcing involves a flexible group of contributors solving small subtasks to complete complex work. Crowdsourcing is already in use in manifold application domains like environmental sensing, image processing, collection and processing of big data, or funding of projects and innovative ideas. Gamification is the use of game design elements in non-game contexts to increase user motivation, participation, and engagement. In the past years, design and psychological research has demonstrated the validity of both approaches in general. However, the technical implementation of crowdsourcing and gamification concepts requires high development effort and is a repetitive task. Moreover, the risk that gamification or crowdsourcing concepts fail in reality after implementation is high. Existing projects still rely on custom development solutions. Little is known about the general technical requirements, methodologies, tools, and solutions for implementing crowdsourcing and gamification as reusable services. Mainly discussed as separate topics, both domains share a large set of commonalities, namely potentially large user numbers, similar requirements for scalability and elastic resource consumption, a high potential for reusable functionality and provisioning as a service, etc. Moreover, gamification is an important aspect for providing incentives for people to voluntarily contribute to crowdsourcing tasks. Thus, gamification and crowdsourcing can be considered as highly interrelated topics, especially from the technological perspective of providing crowdsourcing and gamification support as reusable services in the cloud.

The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers and technicians to share their experiences and requirements in the domains of crowdsourcing, gamification and cloud computing. It should especially foster discussions between researchers working in technical and non-technical fields to carve out the manifold aspects and perspectives on this highly inter-disciplinary field and to stimulate collaborative work towards highly reusable cloud based solutions for crowdsourcing and gamification as a Service.

Topics of interest to the workshop include (but are not limited to):

Real-life use case experiences for crowdsourcing (Smart Cities, Crowdsensing/Participatory Sensing, Data Collection/Big Data, etc.), gamification (Communities, E-Commerce, Enterprise Software, etc.), or both.
Cloud infrastructures and services for crowdsourcing and gamification
Scalability, performance and multi-tenancy of gamification and crowdsourcing platforms or services.
Technical Requirements, challenges, and approaches for gamification and crowdsourcing
Architectural approaches and patterns
Implementations, experience reports, and studies of crowdsourcing and gamification platforms or services.
Crowdsourcing and gamification in enterprise software
Open marketplaces for crowdsourcing and gamification services


Workshop Organizers:

Philipp Herzig, SAP AG
Thomas Springer, Technische Universität Dresden
Michael Meder, TU Berlin