Engineering Incentives in Social Clouds

Combining the strengths of the Cloud Computing and Social Network paradigms, the vision of Social Clouds aims to provide a resource sharing mechanism where participants dynamically share and trade resources on the premise of the relationships encoded in a social network. By building upon existing relationships in social networks and the inherent trust that accompanies these relationships, a Social Cloud is able to address one of the most cited obstacles in the adoption of current cloud solutions, the missing trust between Cloud service providers and users. However, as with other computing approaches relying on user participation, incentivisation of potential and existing participants is crucial for the success and sustainability of a Social Cloud. Therefore, an incentive engineering approach is needed and will be discussed in this paper considering all phases of user participation in a Social Cloud in order to provide proper incentives for active user participation and desired user behavior.