Announcing the (JANUARY) 2021 ID-a-thon (all welcome)

Perhaps I’m not understanding - how would a real-time workshop be run on the Forum?

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Can one not send an invitation to an individual (nom de plume) to join a Zoom meeting and that person join via a web platform on a browser (say, on their smartphone) without using a desktop client that may be run on a Network such as a university - and as such one can be anonymous if they so choose, turn off their camera, and mute their microphone unless they have a question? They can then watch and listen to the video conference.

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I have no idea… But I’ll check it out.

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Something that might be fun is “most annotations”. Like most phenology anotations for flowering plants, or most life stage annotations for lepidoptera, or something like that. I haven’t seen that in this thread yet. That’s not a simple search to check for as the competition moderator, but it can be done with the API.

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I would like to know more about Insects and Spiders to identify for the USA (if possible). And maybe for the wildcats of the world (I’m a cat fan).

But I’m down with just about anything you guys can cook up!

Just let me know when I can start!

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what if you started with 0 IDs?

it might be interesting to vary the starting base for more options. for example, vary by iconic taxon (birds, plants, etc.) or by continent (plus open ocean). or instead of using your own IDs as the bas you could measure, say, % contribution to all IDs of that iconic taxon (to incentivize some to work on less-identified taxa).

i think for this and all other metrics, you would also want to clarify up front whether or not you want to include identifications on a given identifier’s own observations.

for the sake of the administrator (you), if you’re going to do this, you may want to pre-define the possibilities and then (randomly?) choose from the list of possibilities each week. as busy as you’ll be during the competition, you may not want to unnecessarily add the burden of having to create a category each week (and a way to measure it) while the competition is in progress.

it would be significantly easier to get metrics for casual than captive. that said, because captive is a subset of casual, and both should be relatively small in number compared to the total number of identifications, it might not be that much effort to deal with captive just once for grins.

this is hard because these are not consistently defined and may change by location and over time.

maverick and rank-level are easy to determine. most in a 24-hour period would be relatively easy, too, as long as you have fixed begin/end time – ex. 12AM UTC each day. if not fixed, then this would be much harder to determine. if you’re going to determine max per day, you might as well determine count of days with (at least n) identifications.

for unknowns, see below.

actually, this is possible (or at least it’s possible to infer unknowns), but it’s not straightforward to do, and the method doesn’t scale well either. so i guess depending on how many identifications you all do, it may or may not be worth the effort.

i’m not aware of a way to do this via the API in any way that is remotely efficient. can you provide more thoughts on how you would do it?

i agree that annotating is a good activity for some folks. that said, it may be difficult to get metrics for annotation efforts. see note above.

if i understand you correctly, this is very hard to determine. almost definitely not worth the effort.

there’s not a straightforward way to determine this, but it can be done, and it might be interesting.

this would be easy to determine.

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Thus the requirement to start with 100 IDs. On second thought, I could waive that requirement but count differently for people who start below 100.
On third thought, as much as I want to make this event welcome to newbies and have as many people as possible participate, there are already 70 more of y’all signed up than I was anticipating and there is still a long time before the sign-up period ends. I might put a cap at 100 participants for the sake of my own sanity.
If this goes well (I’ll do my best!) and I don’t burn out (no promises… …) the next time I do this I will likely make modifications on the rules of participation etc based on how the first one goes.

Oh I’m going to choose all the mystery% categories before the event even starts. Especially because for most of them I need to count how many IDs were made before the event so as to know how many were made during.

Thank you for all your feedback :)

Also, I’ve decided that the event ends at the end of February. Will update top post accordingly.

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Such competition sounds nice :) Who is Gerald?

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Welcome to the Forum!
This is Gerald.

In suitable fashion, the almighty Gerald crashed my browser when I opened the link. Be patient…

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for the sake of my sanity, the 2021 Jan/Feb ID-a-thon will be limited to 100 participants. If (this is a big if) there is another, those who missed out on the first will get priority placement in the second

If you’ve answered Maybe, this is your chance to make up your mind…

Well, it seems he was so difficult animal to identify! :D OK, I didn’t ID Gerald (yet?) so you can count me in the competition:)

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You can ID Gerald if you want :) My only concern is that no sneaky muskrats try to compete… Gerald is too powerful.

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I’ve been reading through the forum and API contents, and it looks like there isn’t a way to tally phenology work done by users. So maybe that can’t be done for this game, unfortunately. As a side note, as observation data continues to grow exponentially, phenology data is going to become more and more interesting. I hope the API developers add some new features around this part of the site soon.

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I voted which I think declared me ‘interested’ but, in all honesty, I am fairly confused about what all is happening and I was merely indicating interest because I was planning on doing some identification this winter anyhow and wanted to be supportive. I wasn’t planning on aiming for any prize and wouldn’t likely earn one.

So… if my name is on your list of participants, and someone else is interested, please replace my name with theirs. I’ll do my thing regardless. :-)

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I appreciate the support :)
Whatever you want to do is cool with me, it’s all voluntary.

But if you have questions, please ask – it may benefit others who are too shy to ask ;)

I echo this, since there is no other video platform for me to be directly involved with the workshops.

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The ID-a-thon and ID workshops are independent of each other. You can pick and choose as you like, it’s all for fun.

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I just don’t want someone who is keen to fully engage to be turned away because all the slots for 100 participants are full when I am not (I guess) fully engaging. lol… I was just going to do what I did last winter. ID observations. Last year I worked on unknowns. This year I’d like to tackle one species in particular. I don’t know how you’re going to track what I do but if you know… that’s all that’s needed. I figured I’d see how things manifested once it was in progress.

It’s all this conversation about the different categories of prizes and all the criteria for qualifying for them that is blowing right past me. I figured I didn’t need to get all that straight (see above paragraph). But if someone is excited about that, don’t put them on the waiting list for another id-a-thon to keep me on the list. I’ll do what I was going to do regardless of my being a participant in this challenge or not.

I will say, I wish that zoom (type) workshops could be recorded and uploaded to youtube or something so that those of us who don’t do zoom (type) meetings could benefit. But that’s all part of that ‘in a perfect world’ sort of wish. One can’t do everything and what you’re doing already is a lot. (says the woman who used to organize stuff like this a lot in her younger days and knows how much work it can all be)

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If / when I’m comfortable enough giving workshops, I do plan on recording them. It’ll take a few tries, I’m sure – but if you’re all OK with a few awkward runs until I can give a really thorough, engaging, and polished workshop, so am I.
Whatever happens with ID-a-thons, I definitely want to continue passing on my knowledge one way or another. I don’t see the sense in keeping knowledge to myself, and enjoy teaching. (except I suppose in advance of trying to publish something… even then, I wish that weren’t the standard way of measuring academic success…)

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Ishmail has done a few - how to ID a plant family. Link to Proteaceae
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDdqwfMpCmU