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.

 

Mass Rejection Campaign Update!

 

Hey, team! Things have been happening with the mass rejection campaign and we are very happy to share the updates with you. Many of you know that we have been circulating a petition in which the leaders of Amazon Mechanical Turk were asked to:

 

1. Limit the number of rejections the platform will allow to affect a worker’s approval rate when a requester rejects all work (i.e. 10 rejections per day would affect the approval rating, the others would, of course, still be rejected, but only the first 10 would affect the worker’s rating.)

2. Consult with the coalition of worker forums to problem-solve together to create solutions and improve Mechanical Turk for everyone.

 

The petition currently holds 2323 signatures and we have since been able to meet with representatives from the Amazon Mechanical Turk department twice to discuss the topic.

 

The first meeting took place in March of this year. We gathered with seven folks from AMT for a half-hour meeting so that we could propose the changes to the mass rejection system. They brought up some questions and said they would look into things so that we could meet again. While it wasn’t the earth-shattering, “You are absolutely correct and we will change everything you’ve mentioned,” outcome, gaining a second meeting was a big deal.

 

It has been less than a week since the second meeting with them, and (with their permission) we decided to share the updates with you. One of the AMT team members explained that they changed from an “old script” to a “recording mechanism” that involves leadership teams in rejections. It was mentioned that the AMT folks want to sit with us to help with communications on the website.

 

The story doesn’t end here!

 

Stay tuned for further updates, sign the petition at www.turkopticon.net/sign, and come to our community forums!

 

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 Tuesday, June 28th. 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!