Paper Reading #6: Who are the Crowdworkers? Shifting Demographics in Mechanical Turk

Comments:
Adam Friedli 
Wesley Konderla

Reference Information:
Title: Who are the Crowdworkers? Shifting Demographics in Mechanical Turk
Authors:  Joel Ross, Andrew Zaldivar, Lilly Irani, Bill Tomlinson, M. Six Silberman
Presentation Venue: CHI 2010 April 10-15, 2010 Atlanta, Georgia, USA

Summary:

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing system in which tasks are distributed to a population of thousands of anonymous workers for completion. The work is usually a simple tasks that computer would have a hard time doing, such as labeling an image. People who request work to be done create Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs, specifying the amount paid for the job's completion which can be as little as $0.01 but higher for more involved jobs. Amazon reports that the system has now more than 400,000 workers registered, and there are about 50,000-100,000 HITs to work on at any given time.

MTurk is becoming popular as a research tool. Researchers can post HITs for their studies and people can participate anonymously.

The purpose of the paper was to show that the MTurk workforce is shifting towards a more international user base and more people are relying on the system as a full-time or part-time job.

The method used for the study was survey. An HIT was created and $0.10 was paid for anybody who did the survey. This information may or may not be valid because the user could have entered false information or information that they believed the HIT creator wanted to hear.

Results from the survey show that the Turker population is becoming increasingly international, particularly with workers from India. The Turker population is becoming younger too, the average age is about 31 years old. The survey also shows that the number of lower income workers has increased. There is also a discussion about US Turks vs Indian Turks.

Discussion:

This paper was interesting to read because for me it looks like a different way to earn money that I haven't heard of. The market is growing and it's cool to see how it is linked to research. I feel the system itself is linked to HCI and is based around it's design. How this is handled as the market grows larger will be interesting to check on, if there are any changes at all.