This is a continuation of a series of articles on crowdsourcing application and including the most recent article. The original problem statement is included again for context. 

Social engineering applications provide a wealth of information to the end-user, but the questions and answers received on it are always limited to just that – social circle. Advice solicited for personal circumstances is never appropriate for forums which can remain in public view. It is also difficult to find the right forums or audience where the responses can be obtained in a short time. When we want more opinions in a discrete manner without the knowledge of those who surround us, the options become fewer and fewer. In addition, crowd-sourcing the opinions for a personal topic is not easily available via applications. This document tries to envision an application to meet this requirement. 

The previous article continued the elaboration on the usage of the public cloud services for provisioning queue, document store and compute. It talked a bit about the messaging platform required to support this social-engineering application. The problems encountered with social engineering are well-defined and have precedence in various commercial applications. They are primarily about the feed for each user and the propagation of solicitations to the crowd. The previous article described selective fan out. When the clients wake up, they can request their state to be refreshed. This perfects the write update because the data does not need to be sent out. If the queue sends messages back to the clients, it is a fan-out process. The devices can choose to check-in at selective times and the server can be selective about which clients to update. Both methods work well in certain situations. The fan-out happens in both writing as well as loading. It can be made selective as well. The fan-out can be limited during both pull and push. Disabling the writes to all devices can significantly reduce the cost. Other devices can load these updates only when reading. It is also helpful to keep track of which clients are active over a period so that only those clients get preference.   

The software agents that run on the user’s devices regardless of their form or application they interact with, have a dual role. They need to talk to the responses service and provide up-to-date crowdsourced responses to a campaign. They also need to allow users to create campaign or post a response.

The former is an API call to the backend services. It has a wide variety of choices in terms of language and technology used to make the calls. The latter is somewhat more customer special. Some topics are easy to write while others require embeddings. Active messages can be looked up for user reactions but more formal means of communication such as documents, presentations and other form of collaboration artifacts are usually stored in libraries and are reviewed by iterations involving several cycles. Usually at the end of their review, they are somewhat finalized. It is during these times that a label for recognition can be added. Even links to external data sources can contribute to campaign

Tags and labels are not expected to be changed. If they did, their first assignment is sufficient to correlated responses. The addin change for responses and campaigns works seamlessly with the library. For example, the SharePoint addin reads label attributes which it then classifies based on predetermined rules for campaigns Then it makes a call to the backend services for accumulated responses. Each such response is translated to a notification for the campaign that maintains a ledger of campaignand responses which are retrieved from the document author and addin classification results respectively.   Each recipient is global for an organization and does not require integration with an IAM for the campaign and responses services to filter and route the notifications.

The Sharepoint addin can be written in any language. The JavaScript SDK will be a good choice for this purpose since it is likely that the challenge and responses service will use one like that to make it easy to call the APIs of the service.