Programmatic Management of Human Coordination and Collaboration Activities

Hybridly orchestrated systems combine the advantages offered by the central point of control (the platform) to impose the overall choreography and manage trust, scale and execution constraints, while delegating the complexity of determining the low-level execution steps and actual actors to the human participants (citizens). Since the workflow can be determined at runtime by the participants this drastically reduces the complexity of the platform, and since the human participants are expected to self-organize and agree on execution steps, such an approach allows complex and creative ad hoc problems to be solved. However, this comes at a price: finding the participants to perform a task, communicating the task goals to the participants, and having participants reach an agreement on the execution steps are all phases of the task execution with a high risk of failure. Nonetheless, these phases mimic a human-centric approach to solving problems, where a team of people is formed to solve a problem and given a free hand to find the solution under a best-effort assumption. We believe that this approach is suitable for a Smart City environment and describe in this chapter a prototype of such a system, the SmartSociety platform.