Honorable Mention at CHI 2015: Social software to help crowdworkers organize

Our paper “We Are Dynamo: Overcoming Stalling and Friction in Collective Action for Crowd Workers” has been accepted for publication and awarded an honorable mention at CHI 2015. The paper comes out of a collaboration with professional Mechanical Turk workers (including co-authors Kristy Milland and Clickhappier) and Computer Scientists at Stanford. We built a system, We Are Dynamo, to create a protected space for online crowdworkers to propose and debate organizing tactics for activism. The intervention is both technical configuration and an attempt to change discourse about Turkers and their futures.

The system and the campaigns it supported seem to have done so, gaining coverage in both international news media and the tech press: Intellectual Piecework (Chronicle of Higher Education), Amazon’s Mechanical Turk workers protest: ‘I am a human being, not an algorithm’ (The Guardian), Amazon’s Turkers Kick Off the First Crowdsourced Labor Guild (The Daily Beast), Amazon’s Mechanical Turk workers want to be treated like humans (Engadget).