Ubicomp Brainstorming

Technologies

1. MTurk-centric tech innovations

Import badge concept from Amazon retail store; add filter option to highlight badged HITs

Real Name

Opt-in , linked to credit card of requester

All HITs from that requester have Real Name badge

Goals

Badge increases accountability through attribution

Filter increases difficulty for unbadged HITs to attract workers, incentivizing requesters to opt in.

"Real Purpose" + filter (still foggy)

Opt-in

Separate "purpose" dialog box on HIT preview page with "Does this seem credible?" button

HITs with a certain percentage of "yes" responses get "Real Purpose" badge

Goal: Badge increases disclosure and decreases alienation from work; Filter encourages growth of disclosure norm.

Import Review system for HITs from Amazon retail; add "highest rated" to sort-by drop-down

Character limit to reviews

Include "Was this helpful" or Urban Dictionary-esque "thumbs-up, thumbs-down" to evaluate the reviews

Supplements Turkopticon's requester-based review plug-in, which can be circumvented by requesters having multiple accounts.

Goal: Add interactivity and immediacy to current feedback mechanism

Question: Does this overlap too much with/obviate need for Real Purpose?

Add social features for sense of community

MTurk Livechat

Simple box in corner of MTurk interface

See Gwap for example

Requester profiles: Picture, location, business aims?

Minimum wage?

Challenges

Can all these features be implemented as external plug-ins? If not, how could Amazon be convinced to add features to a purposefully light, streamlined, "non-human" platform?

Social capabilities (counterintuitively) increase aggregate productivity by encouraging Turkers to 'hang out' on the site

Review system gives MTurk more long-term legitimacy as a site that cares about its workers

For the features that can be implemented as plug-ins, how to get a critical mass of people to install the plug-in? I.e. how to avoid Turkopticon's apparent sparkle-and-fade?

2. More general tech ideas

Non-profit/philanthropic platform (Extraordinaries)

Alternatively, add "volunteer/philanthropic" to filter option in MTurk. But how to get Amazon to do this when they have zero monetary incentive (no cut for unpaid tasks, right?)

Reputation Portability

OpenID for digital labor platforms, where user identities come with basic reputation information?

Something involving microformats, to make reputations "machine-readable"?

Challenge: how to convince digital labor platforms that interoperable log-ins, etc. won't hurt their market share

To do: E-mail Chris Messina