Guideline for Academic Requesters

University IRBs review and approve proposals for scientific research, much of which gets done on AMT. Several times, researchers (sometimes unwittingly) caused damage and pain in Turkland, even with IRB approval. After a recent research mishap on Turkopticon, a group of Turkers got together to draft guidelines for academic/research requesters working with Turkers. You can find the draft here:

wiki.wearedynamo.org

We want your feedback to make sure these guidelines make sense for most Turkers.

Creating these guidelines sets expectations for IRBs, who hold researchers accountable for the ethics of their research methods. These guidelines cover issues such as the basics of how to be a good requester, how to pay fairly, and what Turkers can do if HITs are questionable.

We are inviting all Turkers to give feedback on the draft. The draft is a wiki, so you can make edits directly, post to a forum on Dynamo (the platform that hosted the drafting process), or post on this thread. The legitimacy of this guideline with requesters and IRB boards eventually lies in Turkers broadly supporting it.

In a week, after everyone has had a chance to comment, we hope to get Turkers and requesters to sign these guidelines. An editor of crowdresearch.org has invited us to announce and post the guidelines there so they can easily be found and referenced among researchers and their IRBs.