A Collaboration Model for Community-Based Software Development with Social Machines

Abstract

Crowdsourcing is generally used for tasks with minimal coordination, providing limited support for dynamic reconfiguration. Modern systems, exemplified by social ma chines, are subject to continual flux in both the client and development communities and their needs. To support crowdsourcing of open-ended development, systems must dynamically integrate human creativity with machine support. While workflows can be u sed to handle structured, predictable processes, they are less suitable for social machine development and its attendant uncertainty. We present models and techniques for coordination of human workers in crowdsourced software development environments. We combine the Social Compute Unit-a model of ad-hoc human worker teams-with versatile coordination protocols expressed in the Lightweight Social Calculus. This allows us to combine coordination and quality constraints with dynamic assessments of end-user desires, dynamically discovering and applying development protocols.