There’s a workshop on Ubiquitous Crowdsourcing at the UbiComp 2010 conference (26-29 September 2010, Copenhagen). The deadline for submitting online abstracts for the workshop is July 15 (and July 22 for the paper itself):

“In this workshop we will discuss how to enable the crowdsourcing to its next step of being ubiquitous, where each and every person on earth would be able to participate and contribute.”

Obviously there are computational, service and platform issues to be overcome for the networks to work effectively that connect the crowds to collaboratively solve a problem – and this may be the sole focus of the workshop. Hopefully not though, as the workshop organisers also identify communication and mobility challenges to be overcome. For example, for rapid propagation and trust management crowdsourcing relies on social networks (‘Web 2.0’) but:

• How do you find the appropriate helpers on Facebook?
• How do you cope with exposure to the real mass?
• How do you propagate the model to solve a problem on time?

This workshop has the following themes:

1. Crowdsourcing model: What are the key components of the ubiquitous crowdsourcing service? What are the requirements from use cases in academia and industry?
2. Expert and virtual team discovery in evolving networks: How can we describe and categorize experts skills and experiences? Furthermore, for complex tasks, a virtual team of globally distributed experts needs to be assembled, by efficiently matching experts based on skill requirements and social relationships.
3. Incentives and trust: What is the incentive model that would encourage high quality (trusted) contributions on-line? How do we motivate experts to participate? Furthermore, how does an expert’s reputation get established through interaction with crowdsourcing systems?
4. Quality Control: What are the novel mechanisms that can be employed to maintain the quality of contributions? How can we distinguish between quality of users when we have so many of them?
5. Crowdsourcing reaches the mobile: How do crowdsouricng solutions integrate with the mobile platforms? What are the new crowdsourcing applications in the mobile domain?

The overview for the workshop contains a well rounded view of crowdsourcing, mainly from the industry perspective as well as academia (the latter is what RunCoCo is studying):

“With the realization of Web 2.0, the trend of harnessing large crowds of users for the collection of mass data and to solve problems has recently becomes a widespread technique. Over the past few years, more and more domains have adopted this methodology for various purposes, including education, pharmaceutical, Industrial development, and scientific research.
Many methods have been proposed in order to catalyze the involvement of the crowd. The more traditional ones rely on motivating humans to share information and by that either gain creditability or get equivalent information . Other traditional ones provide tangible incentives to people for their work (e.g., monetary prizes). Ahn and Dabbish first suggested the use of games as an attractive mechanism to attract the crowd to perform tasks that are hard for computational engines to cope with. This served as a basis for a number of research extensions.
Currently, Crowdsourcing efforts either evolve via certain communities, or are typically published in an open marketplace in the form of a tender, where participants bid to complete the task, or as a competition, where a winning submission is selected from multiple entries. In addition, crowds are also harnessed through games, in either a collaborative or a competitive fashion.
Crowdsourcing currently captures only active users on the web, and definitely has not yet reached everyone. Despite some of the success stories, such as Mechanical Turk, GoldCorp’s challenge, and Threadless.com, the actual realization of the promising advantages from crowdsourcing, are far from being well-achieved and pose an extensive range of interesting challenges along social, quality control, privacy, trust, and technical dimensions.”

Please note you can’t pay just for this workshop – you must register for the whole conference. RunCoCo won’t be able to afford to send a speaker – but we will look forward to the proceedings and hope there is some way to view streamed channels from the conference itself.