am i reading this correctly? that sounds like scummy outsourcing practices to maximize profits by cutting corners with workers which i find a lot more objectionable than working out of a bougie area…
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Why? California is part of the ‘world’ as anywhere else.
Moving a small (in staff) organization like iNat is often a death sentence. Compare with a politically motivated attempt by the US to move large sections of agencies out of DC and to other more rural area. Most of the employees wouldn’t go and quit, because most people can’t or don’t want to randomly uproot their lives and families to some other distant place. To say nothing from moving to a different country on the other side of the globe with a completely different language, etc, honestly that proposal makes zero sense. On the other hand hiring someone from India to work remotely from there could work out great, in the right setting. I agree that the SF bay area is wicked expensive and I personally would never want to live there, but for what it’s worth, several of the iNat team don’t live anywhere near there and work remotely, so I don’t see how it would help anything to ‘move’ something that’s already dispersed and global. And, i think there’s some truth to there being networking prospects by being close to other tech entities.
That all being said, iNat staff should all move to Vermont, it’s awesome here :)
And Cazort, if you have this many concerns, probably better just not to donate, and move on. Or contribute in other ways. Don’t you already run a plant ID website (and from within the US)?
In general, what one donates money to is a complex personal decision motivated by a ton of different factors. To me, I do send iNat money, not a ton since I don’t have a ton… but i consider it payment for a service i obviously appreciate and use a lot. I wouldn’t want the money to go into the general CAS coffers, but as long as it goes to iNat, I could care less if Ken-Ichi uses it to buy himself a few beers or live in a non crappy apartment, that’s great. Certainly if money were his main motivating factor he’d be moved on to some other tech enterprise rather than continuing to work on iNat which is hardly a cash cow.
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To circle back to the “church plate” analogy, no-one is going to be surprised if the creator of a competing church sits in the pews and turns his nose up at the plate as it goes by, but it will raise a few eyebrows if he loudly protests not being able to see what his donation might be used for. And if he then dangles a twenty over the plate, dramatically taking it back and declaring he won’t be donating to this church any time soon…
Wait, is this a reverse psychology thing? Are you trying to sneakily encourage others to donate?
I think @cazort is raising a legitimate question as far as iNaturalist transparency is concerned (income inequality is also important, obviously, but is perhaps too broad of a discussion for this forum), and there shouldn’t be assumptions about their motivations. We’ll have a post forthcoming with some more info
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Thanks for your thoughtful consideration of the kinds of nonprofits you support. We can provide some insights into iNaturalist’s finances. @kueda, @loarie, and I collaborated on this response.
For the last three years, iNaturalist has been almost entirely grant funded from individual philanthropists (many with a long history of philanthropy through the California Academy of Sciences), the National Geographic Society, foundations such as the Moore Foundation, and tech companies such as Microsoft through their AI for Earth initiative, and Google through their Geo for Good initiative. We also have some project-based funding like the funds we received from the World Wildlife Fund to develop Seek 2.0.
While individual donations from the iNaturalist community currently constitute a small percentage of our overall revenue, we’d love to see that percentage grow. The more sustaining donors we have, the less time we and the development team at CAS have to spend wondering how to meet the next year’s budget requirements. Dependable, predictable support from the people who understand us the best is enormously valuable to any non-profit organization, but especially organizations that provide free, tangible services to people like we do.
As a department of the California Academy of Sciences, 15% of additional funds we bring in go toward overhead for CalAcademy, and this includes individual donations. In addition to financial support, they provide office space, legal services, accounting, communications support, and other functions, so the overhead is a way that iNaturalist pays into those costs shared across the institution. The remaining 85% stays within the department to cover staff and operational expenses, like paying Discourse to host this forum, or paying Amazon for image hosting.
Regarding the California Academy of Sciences as an institution, as a US 501©3 tax-exempt organization they are required to publish tax documents, which you can find on their website. Specifically, Form 990 for FY2018 (p. 9) shows the compensation for the highest-compensated employees, which does not include members of iNaturalist staff.
The single largest expense for iNaturalist is personnel. iNaturalist has 8 full-time staff in the USA (6 in the Bay Area, 2 remote on the East Coast) and one contractor. We’re not prepared to disclose individual salaries or how much we compensate staff in total, but we will say that everyone on staff makes less than they could make doing similar work in the for-profit world.
For the CalAcademy fiscal year July 2018 - June 2019, iNaturalist spent $174,000 on infrastructure and miscellaneous expenses. These are the non-personnel related expenses. Like almost everything else about iNaturalist (e.g. users, data, traffic)—except the number of staff—these costs are almost doubling each year.
Donating to iNaturalist (or not) is of course a personal choice. We hope this helps inform your decision. We understand that users have different means and appreciate all of the many ways that people support iNaturalist, financial or otherwise.
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Yeah, I think you’re right that some of this discussion has gotten off-topic, I apologize for this. I tend to think about all problems in the world as being interconnected and I have a tendency to bring in widely disparate things into any discussion, and I recognize that this forum in particular has a strong culture of wanting things to stay on a more narrowly-focused topic.
My main intent here is greater transparency, but I also want to gain a greater understanding of how things like this work. In general, I think non-profits could do better as far as financial transparency is concerned, almost across the board, especially in the case of “parent-child” relationships where a larger non-profit manages a project and takes a certain cut of it.
I also do have a “bone to pick” with high-cost-of-living areas and income inequality and I do have an intent or agenda (not gonna hide it) about raising awareness of stuff I don’t like and being like: “Hey, I don’t like this thing.”
I think @carrieseltzer has answered a lot of my questions!
That also makes a lot of sense about being dependent on large donations from individual philanthropists, but wanting to move towards a more stable, decentralized funding base from a larger number of people, to impart more stability.
I’d probably always like to see more details, but I do appreciate all this info!
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Perhaps this would be a good spot to put a link to a “how to donate” page?
I used to think more like this.
I think over time I have come to realize that a huge portion of the mainstream lifestyle here in the US is unnecessary waste, going to things like car use, big homes (with some people owning second or third homes), management-intensive landscaping, and disposable consumer goods. The carbon footprint is huge, and it’s not just the carbon footprint, it’s things like our low-density suburbanization taking up huge amounts of the land, destroying lots of wild ecosystems and not really putting it to efficient use, and generation of a lot of waste, including non-biodegradable waste. People in countries with lower costs of living tend to have lower carbon footprints and lower environmental footprints in general. Like I’ve seen figures placing the per-capita carbon footprint in the US at around 9 times that of India.
I don’t have a problem with an area being “bougie”, the problem I have is with the consumption of resources. If a person has a high net worth and they use it to maintain their property in a way that minimizes their fuel use, this can help them build wealth. Some people own a lot of land and keep it as intact wild ecosystems, and that’s great! I’ve known some people like that and I really admire and support that.
But when I look at what is the norm here in the US, it is wasteful consumption. I’ve lived in CA, OH, MD, PA, CT, and DE and it’s been the norm in all of these places. All of these places suffer from car-oriented development, gas-guzzling vehicles, management-intensive landscaping dominated by non-native plants, and people buying a lot of material possessions that they don’t need.
And it’s not just where we are, it’s the direction that I see things changing in. Our culture has moved away from repair-reuse and towards disposability, our landscaping has become more management-intensive, car-oriented development seems to continue to be growing. My family used to buy beer in returnable bottles, and it was discontinued a number of years back. I’ve even seen a trend of recycling decreasing…I now cannot recycle things that I could recycle a few years ago. And I see a trend of increased packaging of produce in stores too. And a lot of this stuff, to me, seems to be associated with wealth. The more environmentally-responsible behaviors are more efficient and thus cost-saving, so they are associated with being “lower class”, things like wearing hand-me-downs or buying clothing from thrift stores and wearing stuff until it falls apart.
Like, the more affluent neighborhoods and subcultures have more management-intensive landscaping, larger and more gas-guzzling vehicles, and more new goods, whereas less affluent people are often reusing things more or keeping them longer, not treating their yards with chemicals and allowing more “weeds” to grow, and more likely to live without a car. And of course you have to look spiffy, can’t have holes in your clothes! In the U.S., wealth seems to be associated with consumption.
All of this has contributed to me starting to think differently about “outsourcing”. As soon as the norm in the US is a more environmentally-responsible lifestyle, like when our carbon footprint and other environmental impacts start actually being lower than these other countries, then I will start feeling more strongly about wanting to keep jobs and production domestic.
So, I know this probably seems off-topic, but to me it seems related because of the intent or purpose behind the organization, which seems to involved the preservation of biodiversity.
I’m not saying the suggestion to move things overseas is necessarily a good idea, other people have brought up legitimate reasons of why it might not work well. But…just that I think there may be some valid reasons behind this way of thinking. I hope I have convinced you and others of this!
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Thanks, edited above to add a link to the donation page. In addition to one-time donations, you can easily set up recurring donations at monthly, quarterly, or annual intervals. Monthly supporters can choose to display it on their profile (e.g. bouteloua’s profile—huge thanks, @bouteloua). We’ll be reaching out more broadly to the community about donations as we approach the end of the year.
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I totally get that, and share some of those frustrations. But… I also think iNat is a product of where it grew, and probably wouldn’t have formed at the same time and level if it had formed somewhere else. Peoples’ relationship with place is complicated, and I share some of your feelings about that too, but what bothered me about this dialog is the idea that people can simply uproot their lives and communities and relocate to a different country (or be laid off and replaced with other employees). Are many people in the US unnecessarily wasteful with a high environmental footprint? Yes, for sure, and it’s also hard to not do that stuff when you live here, no matter how you try, since it’s how things are set up with everything around us. But also, we can’t just assume that as special US residents we can randomly move our people and non profits to other countries, while simultaneously continually spouting rhetoric about how refugees from other countries can’t move here. Do we know if India wants non profits and tech from the US relocating there? Do people in other countries like the swarms of USA ‘ex-pats’ moving to them because it is ‘cheaper’ or more ‘cultural’ or whatever? I find a lot of this moves into weird appropriation and white savior issues.
Broadly, I just don’t think it makes sense to expect the iNat staff or anyone else to randomly unroot and move 1000s of miles, given people’s families, friends, communities, kids, etc etc… and also, the environmental footprint for moving (or the travel back to see family) is not trivial either.
I realize I too am going off topic so will try to leave it at this… I think this is an important topic of conversation, as is the question of how iNat funding works, but they should be different topics. I am not sure if this forum in particular is the best place to discuss the ethics of where someone with the ability to choose should live and work, but if it is, it would probably be better in ‘nature talk’ as a separate post.
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