The paper presents Dynamo, a community platform built to enable Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) workers to form "publics" that can move from discussion to concrete collective action. Drawing on a year‑long ethnographic study of Turkers, the authors identify two central failure modes that impede online collectives: stalling (loss of momentum) and friction (conflict and criticism that derails progress). Dynamo’s design addresses these challenges through three core affordances: (1) trust and privacy, providing pseudonymous registration and unlinkable credentials; (2) assembling publics, using short 140‑character idea pitches that graduate to campaigns once they reach a voting threshold; and (3) mobilizing, offering threaded discussion, a MediaWiki for collaborative authoring, action‑button tracking, and periodic email updates. Over six months, 470 Turkers registered, 22 ideas were proposed, and two campaigns became active: (a) a set of ethical guidelines for academic requesters (216 signatories) and (b) a letter‑writing campaign to Jeff Bezos that garnered media attention. The authors detail four structured “labor of action” strategies they employed to keep publics alive: debates with deadlines, act‑and‑undo, producing hope, and reflect‑and‑propose. These interventions required the research team to act as trusted, neutral actors, performing emotional and cognitive labor that could not be automated. The paper situates Dynamo’s publics as “tactical publics”—action‑oriented counterpublics that need both technical infrastructure and human labor to succeed—and argues that HCI must recognize and support such labor when designing systems for collective action.
Topics
Dynamo Platform Overview: Enabling Turker Publics for Action
Introduces Dynamo as a web‑based system that lets AMT workers create, discuss, and act on shared issues through idea pitching, voting, and campaign tools.
Twin Perils of Online Collectives: Stalling and Friction
Defines the two primary failure modes observed in Turker collectives—loss of momentum (stalling) and conflict‑driven derailment (friction)—and explains how they manifest in Dynamo.
Trust and Privacy Mechanisms: Pseudonymous, Unlinkable Registration
Details Dynamo’s design for protecting worker identity, including a qualification HIT, one‑time registration codes, and randomly generated screen names.
Deployment Outcomes: User Adoption, Idea Generation, and Active Campaigns
Presents quantitative results—470 registered Turkers, 5,800 unique visitors, 22 ideas, 2 active campaigns—and qualitative observations of cross‑forum participation.
Guidelines for Academic Requesters Campaign: Process, Consensus Building, and Impact
Chronicles the creation of a 23‑page ethical guideline, the use of deadlines, community feedback loops, and the eventual 216 signatures from workers and researchers.
Letter Writing Campaign to Jeff Bezos: Mobilization, Media Coverage, and Perceived Success
Details the launch, participant recruitment, paid HIT outreach, media pickups (The Guardian, Daily Beast), and the symbolic success of humanizing Turkers.
Tactical Publics: Action‑Oriented Counterpublics in Crowd Work
Positions Dynamo’s groups as “tactical publics” that extend Dewey’s and Habermas’s public concepts, requiring both technical scaffolding and human labor to act.
Researchers as Trusted Actors: Building Credibility and Performing Emotional Labor
Explains how the design team cultivated trust through transparency, undoability, and responsive communication, enabling them to intervene without alienating participants.