Crowdworker online communities -- operating in fora like mTurkForum and TurkerNation -- are an important actor in microwork markets. Albeit central to market dynamics, how the behavior of crowdworker communities and the dynamics of online marketplaces influence each other is yet to be understood. To provide quantitative evidence of such influence, we performed an analysis on 6-years worth of mTurk market activities and community discussions in six fora. We investigated the nature of the relationships that exist between activities in fora, tasks published in mTurk, requesters for such tasks, and task completion speed. We validate -- and expand upon -- results from previous work by showing that (i) there are differences between market demand and community activities that are specific to fora and task types; (ii) the temporal progression of HIT availability in the market is predictive of the upcoming amount of crowdworker discussions, with significant differences across fora and discussion categories; (iii) activities in fora can have a significant positive impact on the completion speed of tasks available in the market.@en

The driving force behind digital crowdsourcing are its workers: working, hidden behind the scenes, churning out data in experiments, participating in research studies, completing little tasks to accomplish HITs online. Understanding workers and crowdwork better is therefore key to develop a more effective and fair use of crowdsourcing for research. This chapter attempts to help develop an understanding of the various aspects of the crowd by drawing parallels between workers of different platforms (AMT, Microworkers and Crowdee) through quantitative and qualitative analysis of current and newly collected data. A picture of the crowd is drawn by uncovering their motivations, workplaces, skills and infrastructure, issues and perspectives about the design of microtasks, the employers and the microtask-based platforms. Legal and ethical perspectives on crowdwork are also discussed, and online resources are reviewed that researchers can use as a primer to employ crowdworkers in an ethical and fair way. The chapter provides information, a review of internationally recognised ethical principles and practical advice to those who would like to use crowdsourcing for experiments and to carry out research studies as an informed researcher and crowd employer.

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