Crowdsourcing and Gamification in the Cloud (Workshop)

Author: Michael Meder

On Monday, the 2013/12/09 I attended the first workshop on Crowdsourcing and Gamification in the Cloud at the 6th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing in Dresden. I gave a presentation about our paper Perceived and Actual Role of Gamification Principles:

The workshop was organized by Philipp Herzig (SAP AG) and Thomas Springer (TU Dresden) with the following topics:

• Requirements for gamification and crowdsourcing
• Architectural approaches and patterns
• Approaches for service composition and Service Level Agreements
• Implementations of crowdsourcing and gamification
• Experience reports and studies of gamification and crowdsourcing services
• Scalability, performance and multi-tenancy of gamification and crowdsourcing services
• Cloud infrastructures and services for crowdsourcing and gamification
• Platform and Software as a Service concepts for crowdsourcing and gamification
• Crowdsourcing and gamification in enterprise software
• Open marketplaces for crowdsourcing and gamification services

Program:

• Michael Seufert, Karl Lorey, Matthias Hirth and Tobias Hoßfeld.
  Gamification Framework for Personalized Surveys on Relationships in Online Social Networks
• Michael Meder, Till Plumbaum and Frank Hopfgartner.
  Perceived and Actual Role of Gamification Principles
• Philipp Herzig, Kay Jugel, Christof Momm and Alexander Schill.
  GaML – A Modeling Language For Gamification

• Tobias Reinsch, Yue Wang, Michael Ameling and Martin Knechtel.
  CINA – A Crowdsourced Indoor Navigation Assistant
• Daniel Schultheiss, Anja Blieske, Anja Solf and Saskia Staeudtner.
  How to encourage the crowd? A Study about User Typologies and Motivations on Crowdsourcing Platforms
• Thomas Springer, Tenshi Hara and A. Schill.
  On Providing Crowdsourcing as a Service (Position Paper)

The Keynote was given by Michael Ameling (SAP AG) who reported an over 100% increase in engagement in the online community at SAP’s Community Networks (SCN) with points, badges, and leaderboard (PBL Gamification). He also introduced SAP’s Gamification platform with “complex game mechanics”. He finished his talk with the following statement: In enterprise Crowdsourcing + Gamification means “Taking gamification and corwdsourcing seriously!”

On this workshop we had several discussion. One topic was the missing datasets issue and that unfortunately also SAP AG can not publish any datasets about user behavior from their gamified systems. We discussed a lot about user specific gamification design and concluded that we need more research on that and therefore we might need to be a bit more courageous in the selection of the applied game principles and mechanics. Later, there was a short conversation about the necessity for more research on technical aspects of gamification platforms and frameworks to enable more complex gamification. This also matched the presentation by Philipp Herzig about GaML, a gamification modeling language which enables SAP to describe gamification functionalities that can be processed by a runtime on SAP’s gamification platform and can automatically be transformed into services providing the modeled functionality. This enables SAP to reduce the efforts of applying gamification and makes it more reusable.

Here you can find some shots from the event: