Turkopticon

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= "helps the people in the 'crowd' of crowdsourcing watch out for each other—because nobody else seems to be. Almost half of the Mechanical Turk workers who wrote their Bill of Rights demanded protection from employers who take their work without paying".

URL = http://turkopticon.ucsd.edu/ [1]


Description

1. Toby Baker:

"This plugin works on the same principle as FairCrowdWork. However, rather than rating platforms, it only collects data from AMT workers. This enables Turkopticon to rate individual employers based on their communicativity, generosity, fairness and promptness.

A recent study found that half of ‘turkers’ earn less than the US minimum wage ($7.25 per hour), with some claiming that they earn $25 dollars on “a good day”. On a platform where employers are not obliged to pay a minimum wage and there are no meaningfulrepercussions for refusing to pay employees at all, Turkopticon is a powerful tool in the fight to redress this power imbalance." (https://digitalsocial.eu/blog/44/workertech-fighting-for-better-work-through-technology)


2.

"Turkopticon adds functionality to Amazon Mechanical Turk as you browse for HITs and review status of work you've done. As you browse HITs, Turkopticon places a button next to each requester and highlights requesters for whom there are reviews from other workers. Bad reviews let you avoid shady employers and good reviews help you find fair ones. You can view reports made against requesters with a quick click.

As you review HITs you've completed, are there HITs you weren't fairly paid for? Turkopticon adds a button that lets you review requesters from your "Status Detail" page." (http://turkopticon.differenceengines.com/)

Discussion

Turkopticon as Mutual Aid for Accountability

J. NATHAN MATIAS:

"Mechanical Turk, which has no minimum wage, is a free market for digital labor. Only the collective decisions of workers and requesters determine wages and working conditions. Since Amazon provides no way for workers to rate employers, workers can’t always anticipate if they will be treated well or paid fairly. As a result, making a living on Mechanical Turk is a precarious venture, with few company policies and a mostly hands-off attitude from Amazon.


Milland and other regular Turkers navigate this precariously free market with Turkopticon, a DIY technology for rating employers created in 2008. To use it, workers install a browser plugin that extends Amazon's website with special rating features. Before accepting a new task, workers check how others have rated the employer. After finishing, they can also leave their own rating of how well they were treated.

Collective rating on Turkopticon is an act of citizenship in the digital world. This digital citizenship acknowledges that online experiences are as much a part of our common life as our schools, sidewalks, and rivers—requiring as much stewardship, vigilance, and improvement as anything else we share.

“How do you fix a broken system that isn't yours to repair?” That’s the question that motivated the researchers Lilly Irani and Six Silberman to create Turkopticon, and it’s one that comes up frequently in digital environments dominated by large platforms with hands-off policies. (On social networks like Twitter, for example, harassment is a problem for many users.) Irani and Silberman describe Turkopticon as a “mutual aid for accountability” technology, a system that coordinates peer support to hold others accountable when platforms choose not to step in.


Mutual aid accountability is a growing response to the complex social problems people face online. On Twitter, systems like The Block Bot and BlockTogether coordinate collective judgments about alleged online harassers. The systems then collectively block tweets from accounts that a group prefers not to hear from. Last month, the advocacy organization Hollaback raised over $20,0."00 on Kickstarter to create support networks for people experiencing harassment. In November, I worked with the advocacy organization Women, Action, and the Media, which took a role as "authorized reporter" with Twitter. For three weeks WAM! accepted reports, sorted evidence, and forwarded serious cases to Twitter. In response, the company warned, suspended, and deleted the accounts of many alleged harassers.


These mutual aid technologies operate in the shadow of larger systems with gaps in how people are supported—even when platforms do step in." (http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/06/the-tragedy-of-the-digital-commons/395129/)