OASIS, the international open standards consortium, has formed a new technical committee to extend the Web Services Business Processes Execution Language (WS-BPEL) to support human interactions.

BPEL4People is comprised of WS-BPEL Extension for People and Web Services Human Task. The WS-HumanTask spec explains that:

Human tasks, or briefly tasks enable the integration of human beings in service-oriented applications. This document provides a notation, state diagram and API for human tasks, as well as a coordination protocol that allows interaction with human tasks in a more service-oriented fashion and at the same time controls tasks’ autonomy.

Man, I am so bummed I'm no longer on any standards committees.