http://rochci.github.io/LegionTools

LegionTools

LegionTools is a toolkit + UI that provides an easy way to recruit and route workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk to real-time and synchronous tasks.

LegionTools provides three key features for requesters:

• Optimized automatic HIT posting - LegionTools makes it easy to automatically post HITs to AMT. To ensure your HITs are seen by workers, LegionTools uses an optimized algorithm to post and expire a steady stream of HITs. Additionally, you can easily change HIT title, price, and other values on the fly. These changes are reflected in subsequent posted HITs.
• Worker staging - LegionTools allows you to pool workers prior to forwarding them to a task that require many workers to all begin at the same time. LegionTools lets you select the number of workers you need, then send them all to a single URL at the same time with the push of a button.
• Completed-HIT management - LegionTools allows you to easily approve, reject, and dispose all the HITs that workers have completed.

Getting Started

Installation

1. Clone LegionTools to a public web server with PHP 5.3 or higher.
2. Install PHP’s SOAP extension. If you’re running PHP on Mac OS X or Windows, the extension is likely already installed.
   • CentOS/RedHat: yum install php-soap
   • Debian/Ubuntu: apt-get install php5-soap
3. Modify LegionTools/config.php to contain the public URL of your LegionTools installation.
4. Add your Amazon Mechanical Turk keys in LegionTools/amtKeys.php
5. Ensure that LegionTools/db and its contents has permissions 777.
6. To allow workers to submit HITs, import LegionTools/mturk.js to your task page. This will look for a form element with id="mturk_form". All that the task page needs to do is submit the form element when its time to submit the HIT.

Usage

• Navigate to LegionTools/index.php in your browser (confirmed to work with the latest version of Chrome) to pull up the control UI.

Recruiting workers

• Add a new task by typing a unique session name, title, description, keywords, and clicking Add new task. Remember your session name, you can use it to pull up your session later on.
• Set the target number of workers. Set the price range and click "Update price".
• Click Change waiting page instructions to edit the text that workers will be shown while waiting for your task.
• Click Start recruiting to beging recruiting. You must click Stop recruiting to end the recruiting process. Note that stopping recruitment will take some time, depending on your target number of workers.
• Pull up a previous task using just your task session name. If you closed the UI page and left the recruiting tool running, you may stop that recruiting process by loading the associated session and clicking Stop recruiting.
• Modify task title, description, and keywords with Update. Changes automatically affect all new HITs posted by the recruiting tool.
• Send workers to a URL with the Fire button. Your chosen URL must be HTTPS.
• When you are ready to review completed HITs, click Reload in the Overview section to load all reviewable HITs associated with a given task session.

Authors

• Mitchell Gordon
• Walter S. Lasecki