Invited talk given June 10, 2009 at first Mechanical Turk Meetup, Dolores Labs, San Francisco

1. The “sourced” crowd
is made of people:
What that means for what
and how we build
Lilly Irani - lilly@differenceengines.com
Six Silberman - six@wtf.tw

2. Lilly Six
PhD Candidate, UCI Arts Computation
Informatics Engineering, UCI
Past lives: Past lives:
UX Designing, Social
Googling, Computer entrepreneurship,
Scienceing Climate modeling

3. IMMEDIATE CONCERNS
“ If I could make the Mechanical Turk Bill
of Rights...
http://turkwork.differenceengines.com/blog/

5. THIRD PARTY REQUESTER
RATINGS
Since January launch:
•264 extension installs
•135 logins
•60 reviewers
•800+ reviews

6. THIRD PARTY REQUESTER
RATINGS

7. THIRD PARTY REQUESTER
RATINGS

8. DESIGN CHALLENGES
•From reports to reviews
•Bootstrapping the reviews database (thanks,
Dolores Labs!)
•Spreading the word

9. TURKOPTICON IS A DROP
IN THE BUCKET.

10. BROADER CONCERNS
•15% of Turkers
always or
sometimes need MT
to make ends meet
•Freelance work as
a growing trend
•Precarity

11. BUT ISN’T IT THE
WORKER’S CHOICE?

12. Down and Out
with AMT
"I realize I have a choice to work or not
work on AMT, but that means I would also
need to make the choice to eat or not eat,
pay bills or not pay bills, etc."
- 37 year old mom in school while working

13. Down and Out
with AMT
“I'm really anxious about the price of gas going up,
because all other significant services and products
also go up. All else increases when the price of gas
shoots up, I am worried that I might not be able to
afford even bread when this should happen.”
- Turk Worker in Phillipines “not making ends meet”

14. Down and Out
with AMT
“My company, which already offers no benefits, will
be going on a 3 month hiatus so I won't get a
paycheck for 13 weeks. I've been looking for another
job but good ones are hard to find now.”
- “Relatively comfortable” Turk Worker in North
Carolina

15. IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT
CROWDSOURCING

16. WHAT DOES IT MEAN
TO BE RESPONSIBLE?
•What is required to be a responsible employer?
•Health care?
•Communicativity?
•Sharing what people are contributing to?
•Helping people find primary employment?

17. Thanks for
thinking about
Lilly Irani - lilly@differenceengines.com
Six Silberman - six@wtf.tw