One thing which surprised me when trying to pass data to recording schemes was that I thought most of them used iRecord, but it seems in reality every recording scheme has a totally different preference as to how they receive records, with many actually preferring spreadsheets by email. It became incredibly messy to grapple with… never mind then trying to manually update iNaturalist records with ID suggestions…and never mind as you mention Steve, the possible duplicates down the line.
My impression after this was that a single agreed method for sending records to schemes is never going to happen. There will always be new platforms and methods as well as the different preferences from the various schemes. Rather, I imagine, there just has to be robust systems in place for managing a plurality of sources at the data-users end. Options such as delineating crowd-sourced data from expert-verified data as they did in the NBN/iNaturalist Northern Ireland trial seems like a good solution in that respect.
I do hope we see more UK schemes joining in here directly though.
Roger Morris’ response when discussing this was that fundamentally the HRS just doesn’t have the time - they are flat out as it is managing the Facebook and iRecord data. Which is fair enough!
It felt a little ironic - as autosuggest, crowdsourcing and the much slicker interface here would seem natural solutions to time-stretched resources - but each to their own…every platform has its pros and cons I guess, and I totally get that the HRS has been building the Facebook group for a long while.
Ultimately one has to be very grateful that we have the expertise in the UK running the recording schemes in the first place! I imagine many countries don’t have such a luxury.
I could also see the bridge between iRecord and iNaturalist being reestablished at some point, but if it was, it needs to be done with a lot more communication and dialogue. The previous bridge caused a lot of damage to UK perceptions of iNaturalist, so it seems sensible to take one step at a time in figuring out how things move forward from here.