How can we count our activties on iNat, as voluntary work?

Not sure if it will work for you, but here in South Korea it’s not uncommon for (university) students to set up a camera to record themselves studying, then upload a time-lapse version of the file as proof of how much time they spent going over the material. Maybe having something like that in your workspace – recording you making identifications, consulting resources, etc. – could serve as evidence of your work.

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it’s relatively easy to set things up to stream identification sessions. that would give you a record of stream hours, if nothing else.

in a normal “volunteer work” situation, you’d be working with a supervisor who would guide the work and verify your hours. i think the best way to get that kind of formal supervision / verification is to start a club at your school and ask a faculty member to both supervise the club and verify your hours.

otherwise, i think the way you would capture these kinds of efforts is to merely mention them as extracurricular activities, where you would self-report your achievements and time commitment.

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If your institution allows iNat IDs as volunteer work, I would think an individuals general stats are a kind of supervision of the work (at least, it shows how much a person did, if not the quality).

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It seems that they agree hours as counting standard. If I manage to convince them and it might need the help of people on iNat to confirm. If responsible people on iNat think it is voluntary work, I think the official will believe. And to @pisum in the same situation, I believe curators or staffs supervisor is capable to be the formal supervision as an out-of-school activity.

As @sebastiandoak says

I think on iNat we do have supervision which differ from walking home from work and pick up some trash, it has qualitative difference to it. At the same time, it has level difference to traditional voluntary work.
The most difficult thing in my opinion is to counting the time on iNat. I didn’t do any record or stream on it. It can be tracked via the browse history of my browser though, but it can’t way back for too long ago. I hope the staff of iNat have some kind of statistic for it.

Ultimately, I think it’s up to you to communicate with your teachers to work out if/how time on iNat can count towards your volunteer work. Ideally they would allow you to self-report hours. If they require some sort of verification (and only accept hours as a metric as opposed to # of IDs or something similar), then you may be able to request that individual users help you verify if they are willing. But otherwise, I don’t think iNat can provide any sort of official documentation.

Unfortunately I don’t know the time I spend on it myself in total :(. Then I might need help from iNat.
Agreement from iNat people will also help convince the teacher its voluntary essence. A third confirmation is need for it. I think this is proably one of the functions of supervision.

Unfortunately, iNat does not have any stats on past effort using hours as a metric.

One suggestion is to see how long it takes you to do x number of IDs at your normal pace. Then use that proportion to get a rough approximation of how many hours you may have spent total for your timeframe of interest. Again, I would communicate with your teachers to confirm this is an acceptable method. Otherwise, you may just have to keep track of your hours going forward and not worry about past efforts.

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I do think identifying should be able to count as service to others.

If your school allows you to self-record time, then I think that’s the best way.

If they need proof, I would do screen-recordings in some form (streaming or not-streaming) for the time you are identifying on iNat. You can then back that up with IDs that you performed during those sessions. For instance, you could include a link to your observations made between certain times that corresponds to the screen recordings. That’s pretty definitive that you put in the work if someone else really wants to verify. All those IDs will have timestamps.

But as others have noted, I think it’s the time that matters, not the number of ids. Incentivizing high ID numbers should be avoided.

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That’s what I am thinking about, using the website @gatorhawk give——If no other way to check the exact time on it. Better than nothing.

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i very much doubt iNat staff will formally supervise you. they have other things to worry about. you might be able to find an iNat community member to supervise you, but the question is whether or not your school will formally recognize that community member as a legitimate volunteer supervisor.

i think you’re making things too complicated. if you can’t find someone on your own faculty to supervise you, i really doubt that anyone in the administration of your school will likely recognize this as volunteer work.

in my opinion, even if it is valuable work, identification on iNaturalist is already borderline in terms of something that i would count as “volunteer work” that you would be able to use for formal credit, as opposed to just resume padding or recognition of an extracurricular activity or hobby.

for formal credit, you really need to establish the supervisory relationship before you start counting hours. so if i were reviewing your hours for formal credit purposes, i would not accept anything that cannot be vouched for by a supervisor.

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Staff or curator don’t supervise certain person and I never say so. But they supervise iNat overall making it not totally unorganized, that’s the biggest difference from walking home from work and pick up some trash as I say.
As I know the teachers, I don’t think they have extra patience to supervise certain student, They don’t check your process, they just want to check the result and ask you to report and hand in materials and check the validation. One thing is for sure that they believe authority, qualified certification or any valid third confirmation. That’s it.
If I really have to do so, I might try to ask some teacher with good relationship. I might see it as last choice if anything doesn’t work.

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