Abstract
Crowdsourcing is emerging as the new on-line distributed problem solving and production model in which networked people collaborate to complete a task. Enterprises are increasingly employing crowdsourcing to access scalable workforce on-line. In parallel, cloud computing has emerged as a new paradigm for delivering computational services, which seamlessly interweave physical and digital worlds through a common infrastructure. This paper presents a sample crowdsourcing scenario in software development domain to derive the requirements for delivering a general-purpose crowdsourcing service in the Cloud. It proposes taxonomy for categorization of crowdsourcing platforms, and evaluates a number of existing systems against the set of identified features. Finally, the paper outlines a research agenda for enhancing crowdsourcing capabilities, with focus on virtual team building and task-based service provisioning, whose lack has been a barrier to the realization of a peer-production model that engages providers from around the world. © 2009 IEEE.