I currently fulfill the role of community manager on the oldest forum for Amazon Mechanical Turk workers and I'm looking to speak to researchers, journalists and businesses who want to learn more about "mTurk" from the eyes of a worker. I can assist in tweaking HIT design so that workers can complete your projects more quickly and more accurately. I can also provide you with a list of great workers to use for a private qualification, guaranteeing the best results possible. I love to educate researchers on what makes "Turkers" tick and what there is to be learned from our community. Lastly, journalists who would like to know more about Turking or Turkers are more than welcome to contact me.

I am also currently a Psychology major at Ryerson University, so I'd love to join any projects investigating mTurk. My interests are varied, but I'm especially interested in studies investigating the psychology of mTurk (why workers do what they do, what the best design/language is for HITs to stop cheating, etc.), or ethnographies of Turkers (the force as a whole, India vs. US, etc.) Let me know what you're up to!

Contact Me:

Speaking:

Digital Labor 2014: Sweatshops, Picket Lines, and Barricades
The New School
November 16, 2014
Design the Future of the Networked Workplace: Hackathon

November 15, 2014
mTurk Workers: We're Here & We're Human: Panel speaker, talking about digital labour issues such as lack of support from Amazon, why communities are so vital to Turkers, worker rights

Sources:
Conference on Human Computation & Crowdsourcing
AAAI
November 3, 2014
Speaking Up, Speaking Out: One Voice for the Invisible Turkers: Invited speaker, talking about myths, mTurk Requester best practices, worker rights

Sources:
CS889: Human-in-the-Loop Systems
With Professor Edith Law, The University of Waterloo
October 22, 2014
Ethics in human computation

Stanford-Harvard joint seminar: Difficult Problems in Cyberspace
With Professor Jonathan Zittrain, Stanford University
January 7, 2011
Cyberlaw and crowdsourcing

Publications:

Life as a mature student on campus
The Ryersonian
April 9, 2014
When returning to university as a mature student, things never go as planned. While you think you can seamlessly slip into the social life of young adults, the fact is that you will never feel as old as you do on campus.

Interviews:

Crowdworkers form their own networks
Financial Times
November 3, 2014
"Only when you harness all the tools available can you make a living wage, or [even] a good living," says Kristy Milland...

Crowdwork - zurück in die Zukunft? Perspektiven digitaler Arbeit herausgegeben
Christiane Benner (ed.)
2014
">>Sechs Dollar die Stunde sind das absolute Minimum<< ..." (pp. 99-111)

Collaboration, Crowdwork, Wearable Computing
Spark with Nora Young (Podcast)
March 1, 2014
We look at the digital layer, between us and the world around us. The internet is always there, informing the world around us. What was once strictly research or weird art projects, are now practical businesses and lifestyle trends. We present the good, the bad, and the questionable fashion of that digital layer.

How Crowdworkers Became the Ghosts in the Digital Machine
TheNation.com
February 11, 2014
Since 2005, Amazon has helped create one of the most exploited workforces no one has ever seen.

Spamgirl speaks! An interview (part 1 of 3)
Spamgirl speaks! An interview (part 2 of 3)
Spamgirl speaks! An interview (part 3 of 3)
Broken Turk
November 17, 2010
Spamgirl is the dutiful, no-nonsense moderator of ... the Turker forum. She was gracious and uncensored enough to talk about her experience with Mechanical Turk in great detail. Enjoy.

“I make $1.45 a week and I love it”
Salon.com
July 24, 2006
In an eight-hour day, when she didn't have the kids to watch, Milland could go through 1,000 photos, making a cool $30.

Mentions:

Optimizing Human Computation to Save Time and Money
B. Livshits, G. Kastrinis
November 14, 2014
One way to measure worker sentiment is via sites such as various discussion fora such as ... sites like www.turkernation.com, which aim to highlight easy and wellpaying HITs (human interest tasks) and warn others about hits that, for instance, do not pay as well as advertised or require more time than expected to complete.

Crowd-Workers: Aggregating Information Across Turkers To Help Them Find Higher Paying Work
C. Callison-Burch
November 3, 2014
I would like to thank... Turker Nation's spamgirl for providing thoughtful feedback...

Designs for a future microtask market (dissertation proposal)
M.S. Silberman
May 9, 2014
One reasonable view was expressed by spamgirl, well-known crowd worker and organizer... in Amazon's Mechanical Turk system (AMT), in 2010...

Crowdmilking
T. Scholz
March 9, 2014
On Turker Nation, a forum for Mechanical Turk workers, one person called “spamgirl” writes that "unions are a way for greedy people to take advantage of companies. As a person who rallies against corporations to behave in just that manner, I would never become a part of any other organization’s plans to do the same. As a group, Turker Nation can fight its own battles we can choose when to fight back and when not to individually."

Being a Turker
D., B.V. Hanrahan, J. O'Neill, N. Gupta
February 19, 2014
Example 7: An Engaging Requester
modgirl
Great requester, honest, good communicator, cares about what is best for us as much as is best for him. Highly recommended. You’ve proven to me that you are a good requester because you’ve asked here for help – you have my respect.

Understanding Indian Crowdworkers
N. Gupta, A. Crabtree, T. Rodden, D. Martin
2014
We have also been studying Turkers by analyzing publicly displayed posts on forums such as Turker Nation, Turk Alert... to understand the Turker perspective and reasoning about their work, Turker-Requester relationships and other practical and ethical matters.

From critical design to critical infrastructure: lessons from turkopticon
L. Irani, M.S. Silberman
2014
Turkopticon, alongside crucial worker communities such as Turker Nation...

Bucking the trend: improved evaluation and annotation practices for ESL error detection systems
J. Tetreault, M. Chodorow, N. Madnani
2014
It is important to look at the reviews that Turkers provide outside of the HIT in venues such as Turkopticon and Turker Nation.

Turk-Life in India
N. Gupta, D. Martin, B. Hanrahan, J. O'Neill
2014
Martin et. al analysed the publicly displayed posts of Turkers (primarily from the US) on the Turker Nation forum to understand their reasoning about work, community, and Turker- requester relationships.

The Chameleon-like Nature of Evaluative Adjectives
L. Karttunen, S. Peters, A. Zaenen, C. Condoravdi
2014
We nevertheless paid them the same fee as the others: $1 for the completed task, more than the prevailing rate at the time, to maintain a good reputation as an employer in the Turker Nation community (http://www.turkernation.com/).

Beyond AMT: An Analysis of Crowd Work Platforms
D. Vakharia, M. Lease
October 7, 2013
Turker Nation Forum. Dicussion Thread: *** IMPORTANT READ: HITs You Should NOT Do! ***

Mechanical Turk is Not Anonymous
M. Lease, J. Hullman, J.P. Bigham, M.S. Bernstein, J. Kim, W. Lasecki, S. Bakhshi, T. Mitra, R.C. Miller
March 6, 2013
While Amazon's Mechanical Turk (AMT) online workforce has been characterized by many people as being anonymous, we expose an aspect of AMT's system design that can be exploited to reveal a surprising amount of information about many AMT Workers, which may include personally identifying information (PII). This risk of PII exposure may surprise many Workers and Requesters today, as well as impact current institutional review board (IRB) oversight of human subjects research involving AMT Workers as participants.

Experiences surveying the crowd: Reflections on methods, participation, and reliability
C.C. Marshall, F.M. Shipman
2013
Posts in forums such as Turker Nation (http://turkernation.com/) suggest that some respondents participate in surveys to offer their opinions about hot- button issues like privacy, permission, pseudonymity, and anonymity...

Saving, reusing, and remixing web video: using attitudes and practices to reveal social norms
C.C. Marshall, F.M. Shipman
2013
The point system gave us a means to retain data from participants who might have found one or two questions confusing, or who completed HITs prior to accepting the work (a common practice reported in online forums like Turker Nation).

The Benefits of a Model of Annotation
R.J. Passonneau, B. Carpenter
2013
To insure a high proportion of instances with high quality inferred labels, we piloted the HIT design and payment regimen with two trials of two and three words each, and discussed both with turkers on the Turker Nation message board.

Crowdsourcing for Speech Processing
M. Eskenazi, G.A. Levow, H. Meng, G. Parent, D. Suendermann (eds.)
2013
Some regulation between requesters and workers exists through workers’ Blogs or Forums, such as the Mechanical Turk Blog (mechanicalturk.typepad.com) or Mechanical Turk forum (turkers.proboards.com)...

Webbasierte linguistische Forschung: Möglichkeiten und Begrenzungen beim Umgang mit Massendaten
B. Juska-Bacher, C. Biemann, U. Quasthoff
2013
Aus diesem Grund wird auf Crowdarbeiterforen wie dem Mechanical Turk Forum (http://turkers.proboards.com/) oder Turker Nation (http://www.turkernation.com/) vor Auftraggebern mit diesem Mechanismus gewarnt.

Accessible Crowdwork? Understanding the Value in and Challenge of Microtask Employment for People with Disabilities
K. Zyskowski, M.R. Morris, J.P. Bigham, M.L. Gray, S.K. Kane
2013
Martin et al. analyzed posts on Turker Nation, one of the online web forums for mTurk workers.

Economic and Ethical Background of Crowdsourcing for Speech
G. Adda, J.J. Mariani, L. Besacier, H. Gelas
2013
There is no social or health security, no guarantee of payment and no support coming from unions (which may however be replaced on the Internet by blogs and forums such as Turker Nation...

Collaboratively crowdsourcing workflows with turkomatic
A. Kulkarni, M. Can, B. Hartmann
2012
We noticed that workers on Turker Nation, a discussion forum, posted messages about tasks created by Turkomatic, complaining about poor wording or excessive scope.

Optimization techniques for human computation-enabled data processing systems
A. Marcus
2012
Turkers keep track of good and bad requesters, and share this information on message boards such as Turker Nation.

Conducting behavioral research on Amazon's Mechanical Turk
W. Mason, S. Suri
2012
Turker Nation is an online bulletin board where workers routinely comment on requesters and communicate about individual HITs.

It's all about the Benjamins: An empirical study on incentivizing users to ignore security advice
N. Christin, S. Egelman, T. Vidas, J. Grossklags
2012
We periodically browsed Mechanical Turk user forums such as Turker Nation... and noticed with interest that our task was ranked as legitimate because we were paying users on time and anti-virus software was not complaining about our program.

Crowdsourcing for Language Resource Development: Critical Analysis of Amazon Mechanical Turk Overpowering Use
G. Adda, B. Sagot, K. Fort, J. Mariani
Nov. 2011
Some regulation between Requesters and Turkers exists through Turkers' Blogs or Forums (for instance... turkers.proboards.com)

Human-powered sorts and joins
A. Marcus, E. Wu, D. Karger, S. Madden, R. Miller
Sep. 30, 2011
Turkers keep track of good and bad requesters, and share this information on message boards such as Turker Nation.

Web workers unite! addressing challenges of online laborers
B.B. Bederson, A.J. Quinn
2011
This concern about wages is reflected in comments posted at Turker Nation [17], a web-based forum where AMT workers (often called “Turkers”) are free to discuss their situations openly.

Approaching the Symbol Grounding Problem with Probabilistic Graphical Models
S. Tellex, T. Kollar, S. Dickerson, M.R. Walter, A.G. Banerjee, S. Teller, N. Roy
2011
We would like to thank ... the members of the Turker Nation forum.

Understanding Natural Language Commands for Robotic Navigation and Mobile Manipulation
S. Tellex, T. Kollar, S. Dickerson, M.R. Walter, A.G. Banerjee, S. Teller, N. Roy
2011
We would like to thank ... the members of the Turker Nation forum.

Labeling Parts of Speech Using Untrained Annotators on Mechanical Turk
J.E. Mainzer
2011
Since Mechanical Turk has no method of rating Requesters, unaffiliated sites such as Turker Nation... have been developed to discuss and review Requesters.

Working the crowd: employment and labor law in the crowdsourcing industry
A. Felstiner
2011
Turkers have already created various online forums to share information and build relationships, (See, e.g., Turker Nation, http://turkers.proboards.eom/indcx.cgi) as have participants in other crowdsourcing platforms.

Putting Out a HIT: Crowdsourcing Malware Installs
C. Kanich, S. Checkoway, K. Mowery
2011
One way to reduce the completed task would be to simply not allow (some percentage of) workers to submit or to refuse to pay them afterward. This is unlikely to be a viable solution in the long term as the workesr will complain to Amazon and warn other workers on Mechanical Turk-oriented forums such as Turker Nation.

CrowdDB: Answering Queries with Crowdsourcing
M.J. Franklin, D. Kossmann, T. Kraska, S. Ramesh, R. Xin
2011
In another case, a bug in CrowdDB triggered false alarms in security warnings for browsers on the workers’ computers, and within hours concerns about our jobs appeared on Turker Nation.

Crowdsourcing Human-Based Computation
D. Wightman
October 16, 2010
Online message boards have been created to provide experienced Mechanical Turk users, often called turkers, with venues for rating companies that post HITs (Turker Nation Message Board System).

Sellers’ problems in human computation markets
M.S. Silberman, J. Ross, L. Irani, B. Tomlinson
July 25, 2010
"spamgirl's warnings pertain to HITs where (a) there is uncertainty about whether the requester intends to pay workers, (b) the requester intends to spam or defraud workers,and/or (c) the task is against AMT’s terms of use."

Automatic Task Design on Amazon Mechanical Turk (thesis)
E.H.C. Huang
April 6, 2010
For example, Turker Nation is an online forum where people discuss anything related to AMT, from efficient working strategies to requester reviews.

Ethics and tactics of professional crowdwork
M.S. Silberman, L. Irani, J. Ross
2010
Administrator spamgirl on Turker Nation, a forum for workers, outlines tasks to avoid:...

WePS-3 Evaluation Campaign: Overview of the Web People Search Clustering and Attribute Extraction Tasks
J. Artiles, A. Borthwick, J. Gonzalo, S. Sekine, E. Amigo
2010
The more interesting initiative, though, was the establishment of a two-way dialog with the Turkers by posting on the Turker Nation bulletin board 9. We understand Turker Nation to be the most popular venue for this kind of discussion...

Crowdsourcing, collaboration and creativity
A. Kittur
2010
Unification sites like Turkernation let workers sanction employers who consistently do not approve legitimate work.

Mechanical Turk
W.L. Forssen, A. Renberg
2010
This leads to fake HITs by non-serious requesters which in turn has lead to a separate part in the community forum Turker Nation, called Hall of Shame [7].

Annotating Large Email Datasets for Named Entity Recognition with Mechanical Turk
N. Lawson, K. Eustice, M. Perkowitz, M. Yetisgen-Yildiz
2010
Out of 169,156 total HITs, we received 702 comments from 140 different workers, as well as over 50 email responses and a dedicated thread at TurkerNation.com.

Crowdflow: Integrating machine learning with mechanical turk for speed-cost-quality flexibility
A.J. Quinn, B.B. Bederson, T. Yeh, J. Lin
2010
The web site Turker Nation serves as a de facto blacklist of Requesters alleged to have used tactics that Turkers consider unfair.

Crowdsourcing for affective annotation of video: Development of a viewer-reported boredom corpus
M. Soleymani, M. Larson
2010
Effort invested in establishing trust accumulates since users exchange information on requesters on Turker Nation... concerning the HITs and bonuses rewarded.

Diversifying Demining: An Experimental Crowdsourcing Method for Optical Mine Detection
D. Andersson
2008
Further, there is an unofficial worker forum called Turker Nation, an active community in which the members discuss and comment on HITs, requesters related topics. Turker Nation was used for worker feedback in preparation of and during the time of the experiment.

The politics of digital crowds
C. Aradau, T. Blanke
n.d.
Turker Nation, an online forum for Turkers, (http://turkernation.com) has a hall of shame of the worst jobs.

Crowdsourcing for Speech: Economic, Legal and Ethical analysis
G. Adda, J.J. Mariani, L. Besacier, H. Gelas
January 18, 2013
Below are some statements, from different sources... Turker Nation, illustrating the economic situation of some MTurk workers in the US: