2nd Workshop - 2011

2nd International Workshop on Enterprise Crowdsourcing at ICWE 2011

To be held in conjuction with 11^th International Conference on Web Engineering
Paphos, Cyprus -- June 20th, 2011

Workshop chairs:

Claudio Bartolini, HP Labs Palo Alto, USA– claudio.bartolini@hp.com
Maja Vuković, IBM Research, TJ Watson, Hawthorne, USA – maja@us.ibm.com

OVERVIEW

Web 2.0 provides the technological foundations upon which the crowdsourcing paradigm evolves and operates, enabling networked experts to work collaboratively or competitively to complete a specific task. Crowdsourcing has the potential to significantly transform Web-enabled business processes by incorporating the knowledge and skills of globally distributed experts to drive business objectives at shorter cycles and lower cost.

Many interesting and successful examples exist, such as GoldCorp.com, TopCoder.com, Threadless.com, etc. Global enterprises are increasingly adopting crowdsourcing given the ease of access to a scalable workforce online. In this context, crowdsourcing takes many different shapes and forms, from mass data collection to enabling end-user driven customer support services. However, to fully adopt this mechanism enterprises and benefit from appealing value propositions in terms of reducing the time-to-value, a set of challenges remain to be solved.

Based on the increasing number of applications, and platforms that provide crowdsourcing capabilities, this workshop seeks to identify novel enterprise crowdsourcing applications. The identified applications will be used to derive requirements for common protocols and reusable Web service components, leading to a set of standardized interfaces for supporting them.

SUBMISSIONS:

Our goal is to bring together researchers and practitioners to facilitate stimulating discussions on the different aspects of crowdsourcing. We are encouraging contributions of short visionary position papers or practical experiences (4-pages) and demonstrations (2-page abstracts). All papers should follow LNCS guidelines. Papers must be submitted, by April 26, 2011, 23:59 Hawaii Time, using in PDF format, using the EasyChair website at:http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ecrowdsourcing2011

Specifically, we are suggesting the following topics as guidelines for submissions:

1. Towards standardized Web interfaces for crowdsourcing:

What is the technical architecture required to enable crowdsourcing enterprise applications?
Based on the increasing number of applications, can we identify the common protocols and reusable components and build standardized Web interfaces to support them?

2. Novel enterprise applications:

What are the novel applications arising in this space, and how are they being integrated with the existing business information systems?
How does the crowdsourcing taxonomy (e.g. task complexity, duration, integration with other systems) drive the requirements for the infrastructure?
What are the elements of the underlying business model and technical challenges?

3. Quality Assurance in Enterprise Crowdsourcing

What are novel methods, tools and metrics for quality assurance in crowdsourcing?
What mechanisms can enterprises use to validate claimed skills and knowledge of the sourcing crowd?
How to deploy an enterprise incentive mechanism to encourage experts to participate and submit high quality contributions (and how does it impact the labor/HR policies)?
How does an expert's reputation get established through interaction with crowdsourcing services?

IMPORTANT DATES

Workshop papers submission deadline: May 3rd 2011 ~~April 26, 2011~~ (23:59 Hawaii Time)
Notification of authors: May 26, 2011 (23:59 Hawaii Time)
Camera-ready submission: June 10, 2011 (23:59 Hawaii Time)