The Team
Data Workers’ Inquiry is a joint project of DAIR Institut, Weizenbaum Institut, and TU Berlin. Led by Dr. Milagros Miceli, our team brings together experts in sociology, political science, philosophy, and labor studies to uncover the hidden labor behind AI.
Dr. Adio-Adet Dinika, Krystal Kauffman, Camilla Salim Wagner and Laurenz Sachenbacher each bring unique perspectives—from political economy and labor history to corporate power in tech and on-the-ground organizing—to challenge the status quo and push for change.
Adio Dinika
Dr. Adio-Adet Dinika is a political scientist and writer. His expertise in political economy and labor activism brings a deep structural and historical analysis of power dynamics to the DWI team.
Krystal Kauffman
Krystal Kauffman is a data worker, organizer, and a research fellow at DAIR. She brings key, on-the-ground research and advocacy expertise to the project.
Camilla Salim Wagner
Camilla Salim Wagner is completing her master's in political science at the FU Berlin. She is interested in interrogating the power of the corporations that shape AI and data work, exploring paths for research that is participatory and transformative.
Laurenz Sachenbacher
Laurenz Sachenbacher is currently completing his master's in the field of Philosophy of Technology at TU Berlin. His expertise lies in Marxist theory, the history of labor struggles, and ethical reflections on technological developments.
Community Researcher
Botlhokwa Ranta
Botlhokwa Nondali Ditshepo Ranta is a 28-year-old woman from Johannesburg, South Africa, who grew up in a township called Diepkloof. She describes Diepkloof as “a wormhole that is hard to leave,” given the pervasiveness of precarized sex work, teenage pregnancy, and drug and alcohol abuse in this area. Botlhokwa moved to Nairobi, Kenya in 2021 to work as a content moderator at Sama. Even though her experience on the job has been sad and gloomy, she refuses to let tech giants dim her light, as she puts it.
Fasica Berhane Gebrekidan
For two years, Fasica worked as a Content Moderator for Meta/Facebook via Sama in Nairobi until she was unlawfully laid off for attempting to form a data workers’ union. She has firsthand experience moderating in regions and communities impacted by conflict and war. Fasica has also worked as a co-researcher for the Distributed AI Research Institute, DAIR. She has a BA in Journalism and Communications from Mekelle University in Ethiopia and five years of experience as a Senior Reporter at The Ethiopian Herald Daily English newspaper, covering gender equality, women's rights, disability issues, youth, and social matters. Fasica loves to travel, read, and have deep conversations with people around her. In her leisure time, she likes to paint and write poetry.
Mophat Okinyi
Mophat is an AI and human rights activist and union organizer dedicated to advocating for the fair treatment and rights of online content moderators, tech workers, and data training professionals. As the Founder & CEO of Techworker Community Africa, Mophat is passionate about ensuring that individuals in the tech industry are not treated as disposable backend labor. With a focus on upholding fundamental human rights and fostering an environment of equitable treatment, Mophat strives to create a future where technology benefits everyone, regardless of race or color. Additionally, Mophat has played a crucial role in training chatbots and language models, including the famous ChatGPT during its development stage.
Oskarina Veronica Fuentes Anaya
Oskarina has over ten years of experience as a freelance data worker. She emigrated from Venezuela to Colombia in search of better economic opportunities. Currently, she works on various online platforms, performing tasks essential to training artificial intelligence models. She joined the Data Workers’ Inquiry to ensure that freelance workers like herself are recognized not as mere tools, but as human beings who significantly contribute to technological advancement.
Richard Mathenge
Richard Mathengue is co-founder of the Techworkers Community Africa and of the African Content Moderatos’ Union. He was born and raised in Nairobi, graduated from the African Nazarene University in public relations and has extensive experience in the customer service industry. Richard coincidentally took a different turn in his career, finding himself in the murky field of tech and AI. He was an employee at the subcontracting company Sama, where he worked as a data annotator and team lead for two years. Together with colleagues, he decided to fight for better conditions, started organizing, and got involved in forming a union, which he advocated should be an umbrella institution fighting for content moderators and tech workers in Africa. His policy in life is to leave people and places much better than he found them.
Roukaya al-Hammada
Roukaya Al Hammada is a 29-year-old data worker from Syria. She works with Humans In The Loop as the lead of one of the data annotation teams and a member of its Beneficiary Advisory Board. Because of the difficult circumstances in her home country, she has been living in Lebanon as a refugee since 2014. Working with data annotation is a surprising turn in her career, as she has a medical background and training.
Sakine Mohamadi Bozorg
In May 2019, after extensive studies and research in Philosophy across Iran, the Czech Republic, and Germany, Sakine Mohamadi Bozorg took a break from academic life. She moved to Berlin and began working as a Content Moderator. This temporary occupation allowed her to explore the culture of silence and anonymity deeply, both physically and mentally. Sakine's diverse educational background and rich research experience have shaped her into an insightful and versatile independent researcher and essayist.
Listen to Sakine's interview with the podcast Purple Code. Watch Sakine's testimony at the European Parliament in February, 2024.
Wilington Shitawa
Wilington Shitawa is a former data annotator and quality analyst who has worked at both Cloud Factory and Sama in Nairobi, Kenya. He is a big technology enthusiast, especially fascinated by AI’s potential in developing nations. Wilington has just been admitted as a student of Computer Networking Technology at Holland College in Canada. Driven by a desire to expose the exploitation of workers in the industry, he joined the Data Workers’ Inquiry project to create this powerful comic strip. By drawing from his own experiences and interviews with colleagues, Wilington aims to shed light on the harsh realities faced by data annotators and advocate for change in the industry.
Yasser Yousef Alrayes
As a Syrian resident and a final-year Computer and Automation Engineering student at the University of Damascus, Yasser is passionate about technology and has been actively involved in projects as a data annotator, contributing to the development of intelligent systems. His academic journey has been complemented by practical web development skills, with a focus on Laravel. He is eager to apply this blend of academic knowledge and project experience in the tech industry.
Alexis Chávez
Alexis Chávez was born in Venezuela and has lived there his whole life. The country’s economic collapse forced him to look for alternative ways to earn income in stronger currencies. He began working on crowdwork platforms and has done so for nearly ten years. Alexis’ strong sense of fairness and his understanding of the importance of these platforms for workers like himself led him to join the Turkopticon team in 2019. Today, he looks for ways to collaborate and improve the conditions for all data workers, which includes bettering communication between the different actors and striving to balance the power dynamics to make the world of crowdwork more fair and equitable.
Doe
Doe has been working as a content moderator in Germany since 2019. They are extremely dissatisfied with the working conditions, which induce excessive physical and mental stress due to constant exposure to disturbing content. Unable to be further complicit in this form of exploitation, they chose to raise their voice to create awareness, foster solidarity and put pressure on employers.
Joe
Joe has been working as a content moderator in Germany since 2019. As a migrant with a bachelor’s degree in science, they relocated to Germany in the hope of a better life. Joe firmly believes that the only way to change things for the better is through collective action and individual responsibility, both of which rely on adequate information about the daily working lives of content moderators.
Lais
For the past 6 years, Lais has been employed as a content moderator at Telus International in Essen, overseeing platforms to identify and swiftly address any breaches of guidelines by users, ensuring neither the individuals involved nor others suffer any harm. Their main goal is to cultivate a user-friendly environment, necessitating work operations to run continuously, 24/7, as is the case with Lais’ team. Having dedicated many years to this sector, he has come to understand the significance and the hefty responsibility this work carries. As a result of this burden, Lais finds it crucial to discuss and bring attention to this line of work. Prevailing conditions have historically imposed a silence around content moderation tasks, hindering societal appreciation for the work moderators do.
Layla
Layla has been working as a content moderator in Germany for the past five years. Reviewing and managing user-generated content involves identifying and removing inappropriate or harmful content that does not meet platforms’ guidelines. She believes that improvements in the working conditions are necessary to ensure the well-being and effectiveness of data workers, including more flexible work environments and mental support.
Omar
Omar has been working at Telus International since 2017. For him, the most important thing is to establish content moderation as officially recognized occupational work, so that after working for several years one does not have a gap in one's CV because of lacking recognition. Additionally, this would allow workers like him to demand adequate wages and numbers of vacation days, as opposed to the bare minimum that is currently company policy.
Ruba
Ruba started working on a platform during the pandemic, after losing his job. Attracted by the prospect of working flexibly, it soon became clear that the platform made far more demands than he had anticipated. The last straw for him was when he stopped to read the clauses in the contracts he was signing and realized that he was the one taking legal responsibility for the data.