Business Processes for the Crowd Computer

Social networks and crowdsourcing platforms provide powerful means to execute tasks that require human intelligence instead of just machine computation power. Especially crowdsourcing has demonstrated its applicability in many elds, and a variety of platforms have been created for delegating small tasks to human solvers on the Web. However, creating applications that are structured, thus applications that combine more than a single task, is a complex and typically manual endeavor that requires many dierent interactions with crowdsourcing platforms. In this paper, we introduce the idea of a crowd computer, discuss its properties, and propose a programming paradigm for the development of crowdsourcing applications. In particular, we argue in favor of business processes as formalism to program the crowd computer and show how they enable the reuse of intricate crowdsourcing practices.