Co-operative Infrastructures: An Economic Model for Providing Infrastructures for Social Cloud Computing

Social Cloud Computing is an emerging online collaboration paradigm which is characteristic of many socially oriented electronic platforms. The operation of such a platform requires computational infrastructure to facilitate the platform itself as well as the services enabling its basic operation. While this infrastructure currently requires capital-intensive investments, we believe it is possible, and even advantageous, to use a co-operative model where the platform (i.e. its computational infrastructure) is provided by the users themselves. In this paper, we define a formal economic model for a co-operative infrastructure in the context of a socially oriented platform and analyze (through simulation) the model with respect to its feasibility and scalability. Using Social Clouds as a use case, we demonstrate in several scenarios that the co-operative approach does not only have advantages over dedicated infrastructures, but also is a particularly suitable model for providing core infrastructure in social (computing) platforms.