Human-as-a-Service: Growth in Human Service Ecosystem

With the sweeping progress of services technology and crowdsourcing, individuals are offering their capability as a service and companies are orchestrating them for problem solving over the web. As a consequence, recent years have witnessed a rapid development of a human service ecosystem. In contrast to web service ecosystem, human service ecosystem is more complicated by the fact that humans grow capability overtime and their collaborations typically imply human involvement. It is thus worthy to understand the modeling of evolution of human capabilities and collaborations for optimization and more effective management. This paper proposes a three-layer time-aware heterogeneous network model, and based on it, a novel method is developed to study how human service providers and consumers develop their service provision and orchestrating capabilities as well as how they collaborate with each other. Exploratory analysis uncovers some evolution patterns which open a gateway for building possible applications such as human service recommendation for consumers, human capability development, and mechanism design for platform management.