In order to encourage the use of more open licences for the work (photos, sound, etc.) people put on iNaturalist, I was wondering if there could be a ‘reward’ or something that makes selecting more open licences more appealing.
And by reward, I only mean something that would make it desirable. For example, there could be a preference for photos with a permissive licence to be shown first on a species page (e.g., photos shown here https://inaturalist.ca/taxa/18236-Colaptes-auratus).
We will continue to promote attribution (CC BY) as the standard practice for citing GBIF-mediated data, believing that it reflects an established norm that the communities we serve use to cite original work.
trying to gamify license selection seems counterproductive. just educate folks on what their license choices are and the consequences those choices, and let them make an informed decision.
Thanks a lot for the reply! I agree that a lot of this is by talking about it and letting people take an informed decision. I am curious what you mean about counterproductive.
gamification doesn’t promote informed choices. if someone does something for the game but doesn’t realize the consequences of that particular choice, they could get a sort of buyer’s remorse if someone uses their images in a way they didn’t realize they could be used. that could sour them on the whole platform or even the act of observing.
right now, taxon pages have the benefit of using the best images available in the system. if you force folks to use images that are worse simply because they have a more open license, that doesn’t seem to help anyone.
gamification doesn’t seem like a way to produce lasting change. the moment the game no longer works for a person interested in playing the game, the incentive goes away, and folks are not always good sports about that. just for example, suppose someone chooses a more open license for the photos in 4 observations only because it’ll allow their images to be used on 4 taxon pages. later, someone else records better images, and their images displace those of the first person in one of the taxon pages. that person doesn’t like that. so out of spite, they revoke the licensing on all of their photos.
Something I have been struggling to understand recently is why it is not possible to build queries searching for observations based on the observation license not on the photo license. As far as I have understood in you settings you can choose to license your photos and observations differently. This makes sense to me as you might be happy for anyone to use the data in scientific research projects but not want other parties sharing or profiting from your images.
However when you search through the observations its not possible to show observations based on their license only to filter placed on the license on the photo. This seems very unhelpful to me - have I misunderstood?
