Crowdsourcing: Ethics, Collaboration, Creativity

KSE 801Uichin Lee

Occupational Hazards

• Employers who don’t pay• Staying safe online: phishing, scamming – Some reports from Turker Nation: “Do not do any HITs

that involve: secret shopping, ….; they are scams” – How to moderate such instances? (in a scalable way?)

• Costs of requesters and admin errors are often borne by workers– Defective HITs, too short time to finish, etc.– Worker’s rating can be affected due to such errors

Helping Workers?

• Augmenting M-Turk from the outside– Few external Turking tools

• Building alternative human computation platforms?

• Offering workers legal protections (human rights)?– Humans or machines? – Legal responsibilities?– Intellectual properties?

• Offering fair wage?– Minimum wage? (or fair wage?)

Collaborative Crowdsourcing• So far mostly “independent” tasks:

– Ex) CastingWords’s podcast transcription tasks• One turker do initial transcription, which is split into multiple segments that are

verified/improved by other turkers

• Collaborative translation with Etherpad– Etherpad: an open-source platform for real-time collaborative editing– Turkers join an etherpad, then add/improve a translation of the famous

Spanish poem ($0.15 for this task)– Within hours more than a dozen turkers were working on the translation

interactively, seeing each other’s edits reflected in real-time (lots of interaction)

Etherpad Chatting

Discussion

• Understanding motivational and reward structure of crowd workers and how they generalize across different kinds of markets– Intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivations? – M-Turk for pennies to Innocentives for tens of thousands of dollars– Virtual cash (point-based reputation) e.g., Naver KiN, Facebook

Farmvile

• Designing tasks based on the needs of different markets– M-Turk: parceling work into short, simple subtasks?

• What else can we do other than cooperative translation?