Crowdsourcing complex Drupal projects

Outsourcing software development is a billion Dollar business and of vital importance to the economy of many countries. Drupal projects have their fair share of this market.

Crowdsourcing services are a specific form of outsourcing: A coordination platform serves as an interface between requesters who need to get work done and a crowd of workers who want to perform work. Examples of such platforms are Upwork and Freelance.com, on which service requesters can publish open calls for so-called human intelligence tasks.

Unfortunately, these crowdsourcing approaches are struggling to provide efficient mechanisms to guarantee a required level of quality of the work results when it comes to software development for complex tasks. However, exactly this would be the prerequisite to be able to more widely apply such concepts in business critical processes to utilize their full potential for commercial enterprises.

How can a scalable and efficient quality management mechanism for crowdworking services be designed in a way that it delivers results with a well-defined level of quality to the requester?

In Drupal we have applicable quality standards. Some are automatically measurable. For the others we have concepts like "tested and approved by the community". Derived from this principles we develop a comprehensive framework to measure and aggregate the quality of crowdsourced commercial Drupal projects. We will look at what commercial collaborative Drupal projects can learn from Open Source projects. Can this be a model for cooperation between East and West?