Crowds and Clouds

Crowds are a given.  Two decades ago the Linux operating system was launched through the open source efforts of thousands of Internet-connected volunteer programmers worldwide.  Just last summer, through an invented on-the-fly peer review process, theoretical computer scientists used wikis and blogs to examine the purported proof in the negative of the P versus NP problem.  The advent of crowds of people to work together in cyberspace has exploded.  Similarly, clouds are a given.  We have witnessed the convergence of trends in data-intensive computing, data centers with tens of thousands of servers clustered near cheap power sources, inexpensive storage systems, and web services that store all our personal data in the cloud.  The obvious next step?  Crowds and clouds.  This combination, along with the cellphone as a communication device for crowds and a portal to clouds, raises challenging research questions in computing, e.g., privacy, identification, undo, scalability.  It raises challenges in socially intelligent computing, e.g., open participatory governance and incentive mechanisms.   It raises challenges for social scientists in terms of the social, behavioral, economic, and legal implications of this technology.  And finally, as crowds and clouds know no borders, it raises new challenges for policymakers in the international context.