LegionTools: A Toolkit + UI for Recruiting and Routing Crowds to Synchronous Real-Time Tasks.

ABSTRACTWe introduce LegionTools, a toolkit and interface for managing large, synchronous crowds of online workers for experiments. This poster contributes the design and implementation of a state-of-the-art crowd management tool, along with a publicly-available, open-source toolkit that future system builders can use to coordinate synchronous crowds of online workers for their systems and studies. We describe the toolkit itself, along with the underlying design rationale, in order to make it clear to the community of system builders at UIST when and how this tool may be beneficial to their project. We also describe initial deployments of the system in which workers were synchronously recruited to support real-time crowdsourcing systems, including the largest synchronous recruitment and routing of workers from Mechanical Turk that we are aware of. While the version of LegionTools discussed here focuses on Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform, it can be easily extended to other platforms as APIs become available.