iNaturalist 2019 Team Retreat Follow-Up

I hear you, I agree a merge/split tool would be great as well. I’ll post an update to the first post of this topic pretty soon.

As for adding more than one photo to an observation, you can do that when creating an observation by clicking on the + button: https://vimeo.com/331880624 Please do put all photos from an encounter with an organism in the same observation.

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Unfortunately, due to the SARS-COV-2 Pandemic the iNaturalist team will not be able to meet up for our annual retreat in the foreseeable future. We’re doing our best to be even better hermits than we usually are.

That being said, it’s been over a year since we created this topic, so we wanted to bring you up to date on the 2019 agenda. As noted below, a lot of time and resources over the past year have been dedicated to scaling issues such as infrastructure, adding translations (thank you, translators!), taxonomy, and various community related issues.

Revamped notifications system and dashboard - This will have to be a revision from the ground up so it will take some time, but we acknowledge that this is part of the site which needs a big update. I’ve started a topic in General where you all can share any thoughts you have about notifications. Note that new Feature Requests about notifications won’t be approved, please share your thoughts in the General topic.

Still a work in progress and it’s really complicated, involving a lot of tight coordination in both design and programming. We hope to have a full notifications revamp out later this year.

Implementing an embedded translation feature for comments and descriptions, similar to what’s found on Twitter and Facebook.

Have done some research but haven’t tried anything out yet.

Create a tool to help users split and merge their observations

Still on the drawing board.

Releasing a significant update to Seek in the next few months.

It happened! Great work from @albullington and @abhasm plus everyone else.

Rewriting the Explore/Observations Search page and adding more filters.

We haven’t started on this, but are collecting suggestions here.

Adding a user-to-user trust system. For example, I could trust kueda and he would be able to see true locations of my observations.

This has been implemented.

Investigate ways to capture comments and ID remarks that are useful for making identifications and including them on the taxon page and in identification tools.

Some movement here, but nothing actionable.

Bring up the iOS app to feature parity with the Android app.

The old underlying code of the iOS app has finally been expunged, so we can start moving forward with adding features.

Re-design/re-organize the Account Settings page. It’s pretty messy at the moment and if more settings are desired, it would be best to make that page more manageable.

It hasn’t been redesigned.

Continue to improve the Computer Vision model and the use of geospatial data in suggestions.

Two versions of the model have been released in the last year, you can read our blog post about the latest one.

Continue to upgrade infrastructure and make the site more efficient behind the scenes as the community scales.

iNat continues to grow exponentially and @pleary has done heroic work to keep it functioning and up to speed. The new map tiles are one of his major user-facing efforts in this regard, in addition to a lot of behind the scenes things.

And this list doesn’t include the many various smaller feature requests and bug fixes which have been implemented over the last year.

Thank you for your patience as we continue to work on on improving iNaturalist, and thank you for all of your contributions to the community, we really do appreciate it. Please stay safe and healthy during this time.

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Wanted to provide an update now that this thread is now over four years old (!):

Revamped notifications system and dashboard - This will have to be a revision from the ground up so it will take some time, but we acknowledge that this is part of the site which needs a big update. I’ve started a topic in General where you all can share any thoughts you have about notifications. Note that new Feature Requests about notifications won’t be approved, please share your thoughts in the General topic.

This is still on the backburner. A lot of design and coding attention is focused on the new mobile app.

Implementing an embedded translation feature for comments and descriptions, similar to what’s found on Twitter and Facebook.

No movement, but there’s a feature request you can follow.

Create a tool to help users split and merge their observations

No movement on this.

Rewriting the Explore/Observations Search page and adding more filters.

We haven’t made progress here aside from collecting ideas and requests.

Investigate ways to capture comments and ID remarks that are useful for making identifications and including them on the taxon page and in identification tools.

On the backburner.

Bring up the iOS app to feature parity with the Android app.

We decided to build a brand new app instead, so while some features were added to iOS, we’re only doing bug fixes and minor updates now.

Continue to improve the Computer Vision model and the use of geospatial data in suggestions.

Lots of changes here, mostly due our using transfer learning, and the model is updated once a month now. See this blog post and subsequent computer vision posts on the iNat Blog.

Continue to upgrade infrastructure and make the site more efficient behind the scenes as the community scales.

This work has continued and the long downtime last March helped out a lot. But as iNat continues to grow, this work is a constant.

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