Turk Feb 26, 2020 Quiz Time (5-7 minutes). Quiz on Turkopticon - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

CMSC 20370/30370 Winter 2020 Empowering workers in the Gig Economy Case Study: Amazon Mechanical Turk

Feb 26, 2020

Quiz Time (5-7 minutes).

Quiz on Turkopticon

Principles of Good Design

Administrivia

• GP3 prototype testing session on Friday
• GP3 due on Monday

Today’s Agenda

• Gig Economy
• Case Study: Turkopticon

Case Study: Turkopticon

• Focus on Amazon Mechanical Turk platform

for crowdworkers

• Felt that the platform was not protecting

workers

• Developed a worker’s bill of rights
• Created Turkopticon system to allow workers

to rate employees and see others reviews

• Discuss the system and outline design

implications for activists systems

What is the gig economy?

• Basically refers to people getting short term

engagements, temporary contracts, or doing independent contracting

• “gigs”
• Also called sharing economy, freelancer

economy, agile workforce, independent workforce

• One gig is only a small fraction of workers

income

• Worker has to accumulate many gigs to earn

a full time income

How does the gig economy operate?

• Many different platforms for connecting

workers looking for flexible work conditions to employers

Benefits

• Flexible hours
• Can do challenging projects
• Can build up skill sets
• Do not need skills in many cases
• Work from anywhere as long as you have

internet connection

Cons

• Temporary
• No benefits packages
• Easier to be exploited
• Can develop health issues related to

repetitive tasks (e.g. Amazon warehouse)

Why does this work?

What is Amazon Mechanical Turk?

What is an example HIT?

• A HIT is a human intelligence task

Are there competing platforms to AMT?

AMT in Research

AMT use is broader than HCI/CS

Why is AMT problematic?

• Workers can be denied payment for tasks
• Workers cannot negotiate with requesters
• Lots of work for not much money
• Can be discrimination (approval rating,

location)

• Sometimes exposed to unethical/illegal

tasks

What does Turkopticon do?

How did they create it?

• Created a HIT for worker’s bill of rights
• Had to seed the system with reviews
• Used HIT to seed the system

Why did they create it?

• Help with transparency
• Give workers a voice
• Ensure that unfair requesters or

questionable requesters are

• uted
• Any issues with current implementation?

Is it missing any features?

• What about voice of requesters?
• Also, later moved to user ids instead of
• bscured email addresses

What are the design implications from Turkopticon?

• Keeping up with changing interface of

AMT

• Tactical quantification

– E.g. what is “generosity”?, different people have different scales

• Creating public where workers can engage

even in absence of physical office

• Success but also supporting system that is

potentially exploiting people

Turkopticon 2 – review HITS

Alternatives?

• Build other worker-friendly platforms
• Create tools to augment existing platforms
• Offer legal protections
• ?
• Any changes to UCD for this work?

SIGCHI #HCIxCooperativism

Summary

• Gig economy has really taken off
• Workers benefit but also face exploitation
• How to ensure fair environment for workers?
• Creating publics for workers to engage and

have more transparency can help

• Regulation plays a part but can also create

systems to give workers agency

• The crowd is a wonderful resource but a

crowd is made up of people

Coming up…

• GP3 prototype due on Friday
• GP3 report due on Monday

Get in touch:

Office hours: Fridays 2-4pm (Sign up in advance) or by appointment JCL 355 Email: marshini@uchicago.edu