The CNC has been a mind-blowing success, and perhaps the most incredible use of the versatile iNat platform. The proof is in the pudding; just look at the staggering participation numbers and growth! There is no perfect date that would work world-wide for CNC. And a staggered schedule would seem to take away the fun and drama of a common shared event. That would be like holding The Masters golf tournament where Tiger plays in Feb because he plays best in the cold, Rory plays in July because he likes it hot, and Phil and Bubba play in Nov because their games work best with temps in the middle, and we’ll let you know who won when they’re all done. Personally I think the current dates work well for a large percent of the world’s users (again the number of participants is off the chart for cities around the globe), and it’s perfectly situated during the week of Earth Day. Besides, to me the real purpose of the CNC is as a fun event designed to get a lot of people out learning about the biodiversity in their particular area at the same time, not really a competition to truly gauge biodiversity of different places.
If you wanted a way to compare participating cities (or any geo-fenced boundaries) against each other that took into account the full diversity of all locations across the seasons and not on just one long weekend snapshot, maybe have a separate end-of-the-year species/observations total competition for those same cities. I’m not an iNat expert, but I would think this could be just making a copy of the configuration for the CNC set-up for each city and changing the date range filter to the entire year. Then announce your year-long iNat Champion Cities and rankings.
right, but the current date isn’t fun, or even safe, for a lot of places. I suspect it will never change and I’ll just have to look at it as a day to avoid iNat because it runs slow. I’d still love to see some separate northern cities thing happen in the summer.
Not all of California. I’m in the area of the Sacramento Region CNC, which extends east to the Nevada border, so many of the region’s plant species in the Sierra are under snow. I would prefer June or July.
ok someone is gonna be pissed, but here’s the bottom line. It favors the Bay Area and pretty much only that. LA is a bit past peak anyhow. I think the Bay Area is at peak penology and may be the only place on the planet that is. LA still won that first year though.
I just wanted to throw in my hat here and say that in my opinion, what you and Lila do for iNaturalist is incredible, both during CNC and the rest of the year. I for one am honored that iNaturalist is your partner and a platform for your projects.
Also, as you might imagine, I have some small experience with feedback on the internet and how casual feedback from others can really hurt. You have my sympathies.
Thanks, Alex! That means a lot to me, and I appreciate it. And very much appreciate you and the rest of the iNat staff who keep iNat running during the CNC and consistently improve this already-amazing platform to make it even better and easier for folks like us to get other people excited to use it. I know CNC wouldn’t be nearly as successful if we were using a different platform!
Remember the goal is to get the maximum number of people involved. In order to do that in a contest, there has to be some sense that your “team” could at least be competitive or there is no point in trying for some people. If you force a team to try to compete when there are temperatures below freezing or above 100F (37C) you discourage that participation. A region with wet/dry seasonality shouldn’t have to compete in the middle of the dry season.
Nor are all weekends created equal. Regional festivals and religious holidays may interfere with a city’s participation.
In order to maximize participation, teams should feel like they have a chance. To make that happen the solution seems obvious to me - let each competing city pick their own three day time period.
This will involve more people stepping up and getting involved. We will need regional coordinators to share some of the burden. Current leaders will have to train (maybe a short video) other coordinators.
This seems doable.
Yes, the idea of everyone doing it the same day is lost. Of course, another alternative would be to let each country/region take turns picking the dates for all of us. That means kiwifergus will be setting it up for mid December sometime. ;-)
thank you for all you do! it is hard not to take internet comments personally especially when they are coming from people who ostensibly are on the same team as you.
So, thank you CNC organizers and iNat managers for doing amazing work as usual.
It was a fun and exciting way to grow inat when inat was tiny. Now it’s getting hard to manage. In addition to the people who run it not having the resources to do such a huge challenge, inat doesn’t either. It’s been a wonderful success but kind of a victim of its own success. How does it scale? Are we going to have ten million observations next year? We aren’t recruiting IDers exponentially. It’s hard.
I completely agree with regard to conflicting events. We got asked to host a Bio-blitz for it, as our counties are part of the Sacramento “city” region. At 6000’ in the Sierra Nevada, the timing was near-pointless, but regardless, we’re tied up with Earth Day events those weekends. Sadly, we can’t do it all, and neither can our participant base.