Flowchart for Trust permissions for Umbrella & Collection Projects?

General
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Hi all,

I was recently a part of a group discussion where there was confusion around what exactly triggered the re-verification of trusting projects with hidden coordinates. Looking through the help documents and previous forum posts, there’s not a clear answer that I could find.

Essentially, the group runs several projects that is mostly based on tracking taxa that have coordinates hidden by default. One is an umbrella project, and it collates several collections. The collections and umbrella project both require the individual to join, and on joining, they are prompted to set their level of trust with hidden coordinates.

However, in the past, it seems like adding people to the projects required the re-establishment of trust settings, so they’ve been sending out manual messages asking people to opt-in again to the trust settings whenever they make changes to the projects. There was also a lot of concern over whether adding admins to the umbrella project would cause trust settings to need to be re-established for collection projects below it. Likewise, would changing settings in a collection subproject cause people to need to re-trust the umbrella project?

What I’m curious about and looking for is a logic flowchart of what causes the trust of hidden coordinates to be triggered for reverification or opting in again. Or, at least, clear documentation of what causes this so I can make my own flowchart to help figure out the changes that will and won’t trigger this.

As far as I am aware, the only reason this should happen is if the requirements of the project are changed (i.e, taxa included), or if the admins of a project change (i.e., someone new is added… does it still happen if someone is removed?).

Secondarily – are users notified and required to opt back in explicitly? It seemed unclear, and it seems like there have been significant changes to the way trusted coordinates are handled in iNat recently. I’ve seen in some of the help articles that no hidden coordinates will be visible for one week if changes are made, but I can’t find much/any information on when a user might need to explicitly opt back in. But, it sounds like this has been an issue with this umbrella project in the past where it had been clearly un-checked as trusted in the user’s project settings, so I’m just trying to dig into this a little bit to determine the project guardrails.

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No one should have to edit their personal settings in a project they’ve joined when a project admin modifies the project. From the project edit page:

If you want access to the hidden coordinates of obscured observations, this option will allow people who have joined this project to trust the project admins with access to those hidden coordinates. Project members will be able to grant access to the hidden coordinates of any of their observations that appear in this project, or just the observations that are obscured because of threatened taxa.

However, this will also notify all trusting project members every time you change the project observation requirements, so they can reassess whether they want to continue trusting you given the new requirements. Your access to hidden coordinates will be revoked for one week after changing the observation requirements so members have time to do this.

There’s a dashboard notification but people aren’t required to change anything if they are fine with the changes. The dashboard notification and waiting period provides an opportunity for people to choose to permanently revoke access if they disagree with the new project settings. Access to hidden coordinates for project admins is otherwise restored after one week.

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First, I’ll say that there seems to be a bug with trust and collection projects. So if you’re not able to access hidden coordinates it could be due to that. We’re looking into it, I’m sorry if it’s affecting you.

What do you mean by “adding people”? Are you adding new users to the “Users” requirement? Adding new admins to the project? Or are you referring to people joining the project?

Correct. There could be a bug here, but the intended behavior is that the members are notified and the project owner/admins must wait a week to access true locations.

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Supposedly, it isn’t possible to actually trust an Umbrella project even though that option shows up when joining one.

I asked for that to be fixed, but nothing seems to have come of it.
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/delete-member-trust-option-from-umbrella-projects/64893

see also https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/viewing-obscured-coordinates-in-umbrella-project/37462/2