Welcome to your Turkopticon Newsletter 

We have had a busy start to the year and with your help, we can carry on trying to make turking better for us all.

To leave reviews please visit our homepage turkopticon.net.

Have you been affected by a mass rejection? We’d love to hear your story. Please contact us.

See the bottom of the newsletter for how you can submit short articles.

 

Check it Out! We’ve Been Doing Things –

Mass Rejection Campaign & Other Updates

The last year has been busy for the folks at Turkopticon and the TO community! We want to highlight some projects and work that has been done, as much happens “behind the scenes.” It is important to remember that none of this would be possible without the support of turkers and requesters!

 

We started holding open community forums for turkers to speak about issues. There have been many hours of productive conversation, brainstorming, and ideas. It has been great speaking and working with turkers from around the world. We discussed the changes that could improve the mass rejection system. We intend on continuing our open forums via Zoom and hope to meet some of you!*

 

We drafted the mass rejection petition and published it on coworker.org when the right time came. So many hours went into that moment, and the response was amazing! The turker community and turker allies stepped up to sign. Currently, the petition holds 2,301 signatures. Thank you for signing and sharing! (You can still sign and share here: www.turkopticon.net/sign.) This petition was emailed to several AMT employees along with a request for a meeting to propose our ideas. We did have that meeting and are, at present, waiting to hear back from Amazon. While we are grateful to have the line of communication with the AMT team, we need more. We asked when we could see changes happen, and we were informed we would hear something over the coming weeks. Our team recently reached out again for a response. Check out the links below to follow for updates!

 

Changes and tweaks to the website are a regular occurrence. Our software team meets weekly to address issues, feedback, and perform changes. For example, recently, the team met with several turkers to discuss the problems with voice-to-text software use in surveys.

 

We have a unique opportunity to learn from each other. Turkers are a diverse group of people, and the skills shared in groups and forums are fantastic. Some may have thought it was convenient to keep us apart. However, watching people come together has been inspiring.

 

There is always something going on! To follow future updates, you can also follow us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/turkopticon) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/Turkopticon.)

 

*Camera use is not required in the open forums. You may use one if you wish, however! In addition, we utilize chat when audio is an issue, we have a Spanish-speaking team member, and we also use a translation website if needed.

 

Our Next Open Forum

If you have thoughts on Turkopticon’s mass rejection campaign or any other issues facing turkers, we would like to invite you to our open community forum on Wednesday, May 18th. Turkers can stop by between the hours of 1-3 pm EST. As always, we will try to answer questions about the platform itself, turker tools and forums, how to get started on AMT, and more. Please fill out the registration form at the link below and we will provide the Zoom link. Camera use is optional. Feel free to come for 2 minutes or the full 2 hours. We look forward to chatting with you all next week!

Signup at https://turkopticon.net/open-forum

If you want to learn more or have questions, please email us at volunteercoms@turkopticon.net.

Turkopticon is looking for suggestions!

Do you have suggestions for how to make Turkopticon better and would like to share them with us?

 

Please email volunteercoms@turkopticon.net and someone will be in contact to further hear about your suggestions and see how we all can work together to make Turk better for all of us.

 

Even if you think your ideas are ones we should know please don’t be afraid to send them our way because we listen to all suggestions and want everyone to be heard!