Power in unity: Forming teams in large-scale community systems

The internet has enabled the collaboration of groups at a scale that was unseen before. A key problem for large collaboration groups is to be able to allocate tasks effectively. An effective task assignment method should consider both how fit teams are for each job as well as how fair the assignment is to team members, in terms that no one should be overloaded or unfairly singled out. The assignment has to be done automatically or semi-automatically given that it is difficult and time-consuming to keep track of the skills and the workload of each person. Obviously the method to do this assignment must also be computationally efficient. In this paper we present a general framework for task-assignment problems. We provide a formal treatment on how to represent teams and tasks. We propose alternative functions for measuring the fitness of a team performing a task and we discuss desirable properties of those functions. Then we focus on one class of task-assignment problems, we characterize the complexity of the problem, and we provide algorithms with provable approximation guarantees, as well as lower bounds. We also present experimental results that show that our methods are useful in practice in several application scenarios. © 2010 ACM.