Experience suggests this thread will be locked or deleted before long, but I suppose I may as well get my 2 cents worth in.
I do not feel that the current iNat leadership cares much about either addressing the concerns of users, or even attempting to find out what the user base’s wishes are.
A focused battery of public user surveys - and meaningful changes implemented based on their results - would go a long way towards restoring trust. But at present, it feels like the leadership is excited about the tech aspects while overlooking the interests of the users who actually make this site meaningful and functional.
I have personally decided to take something of a step back from the platform due to this. I won’t be leaving it at this point - I still need to use it for my work, for one thing - but I’m taking a break from any major IDing or curating efforts.
Uhf. Lots of feels here. Props to everyone who shared.
Full disclosure: I’m the executive director of a US Nonprofit, aka NGO in other parts of the world. It’s small, tiny actually, compared to many. I am absolutely looking at this situation through my Exec Director glasses. These are my thoughts.
I think about money every single G-d-bless-America day. I assume the leadership team does as well. It figures into decision making way more than you realize. Keep that in mind.
100% Board giving is not plutocracy. It’s essential, not for the money it brings in from the board but b/c major gift donors, particularly foundations, look at board giving as part of their org eval. The reasoning is if the board doesn’t think this is a cause worth giving to, why should we? The only time there is wiggle room on this is if the org is human services related where a board member represents the served population, e.g., a victim of domestic violence or homeless veteran. iNat is not that.
iNat is doing a lot with relatively little. I looked at iNat’s 2024 form 990 and compared it to the financials I could find for Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the parent org of Ebird, which does not file its own 990 as it is an administrative unit of Cornell University. Prime rib and hamburger, my friends. Just to be clear, iNat is the hamburger. A 2 oz/57 Gram hamburger. With global reach and impact.
From where I sit in the nosebleeds, it does seem that iNat is paying attention to the requests for identifier support: removing casual from the CNC & the Ident-a-thon being Exhibits A and B respectively. And the CV, while I don’t love it, is an attempt to lighten the identifier load.
Please read this in the tone of greatest respect inside your head. The things that some of you are asking for cost a hella lot money. You have no idea what it would take to fully implement them. I feel tight in the chest and have to scroll by quickly when I read them b/c my Exec Director brain kicks in thinking about what it would take to implement.
I can’t defend all of iNat’s decisions but I’m here to say - the way I see it - that they are doing what they can with what they have. Does that mean you should sit down and shut up? Not at all. Just be cognizant of the context, is all.
(sigh) This is a classic tale of startup to growth to maturity but what Harvard Business Review doesn’t tell you is that process isn’t really linear, it’s always messy, and when you are in the midst of it you can’t really tell what’s going on.
Agree 1000% re number 1 and 2. (Not saying I disagree with the rest, just reinforcing what you said on those points). Board members giving is a very expected practice in US nonprofit land.
I’m confused about this point now. It used to be very clear that the CNC was not run by iNat–they wouldn’t mention it on their blog or answer any questions about it–but that seems to have changed last year, when the main iNat site promoted the CNC before and during the event. And CNC co-founder Alison Young is now iNat’s Director of Outreach Programs? So the lines have blurred.
I think it can become iterative atleast once base step starts of working with what we have.
It may even require that the planned solutions inturn will have to be modified again and require further feedbacks or surveys in future. Some of the points you mentioned earlier that was missed in survey do end up in comments (I had made one of yours) and they can be used for future surveys again as more explicit points once some of existing ones are solved. Granted a missed question option may have more priority and skewed results for all but if it is high priority for more it may have equally ended up more atleast in comments too relatively even after accounting other factors, either way that still keeps current survey questions progress a better step - where existing options were also long pending requests and doesn’t invalidate their relative priorities inturn from surveys that happened.
I’ve worked at a few orgs in which leadership decided it was too expensive/time consuming to prioritize internal communications. They all had extremely low morale and high turnover. It is true that nonprofits can persist and even grow for a very long time with low morale and high turnover as long as the donors stay. Usually, because of that failure of internal communication, the ED/CEO and board seem to have no idea how low morale is, and staff at many of the biggest nonprofits I’ve interacted with at are eager to share horror stories. The difference with iNat is that there is a relatively small group of volunteers (we don’t call them that, but that’s what they are) who are extremely difficult to replace and without whom the whole thing doesn’t work. They are close to a non-renewable resource, so instead of turnover you just get attrition. @graysquirrel is one. I would like to see iNaturalist invest in protecting that vital resource.
I think I am one of the people that helps write up the allergy info for what is sold in the cafe (Annotator) which is not important for most people most times but can be very helpful for a few.
I don’t think it is helpful that for many, this thread is the first indication of potential problems. I certainly didn’t expect to come across the topic when looking at Reddit the other day. So there IS a communication problem that iNat leadership needs to address.
I was horrified at how many staff have left and I feel for the ones that remain. People will put up with a lot in an organisation and there is no such thing as a perfect workplace or organisation. The last straw tends to be bad management and that is almost always poor communication and people not feeling valued.
Good organisations are open to feedback. The forum may represent a small number of total users but how much of the day to day work is done by active forum members? That is a stat I would like to see.
Appreciate your input. Regarding those much wanted features and a limited pot of money, is it not possible to say that Feature A is not doable at present and these are the barriers, or that Feature B is a priority because it is needed to develop Feature C which everyone wants?
What are iNat’s priorities at present? I honestly don’t know.
Seeing how it seems a little safer to talk. To be more specific, one can use the wayback machine on the staff page and compare it with today. You will see that since December 17th 2024, about a year and one month ago. 6 staff members out of 16 normal staff (not board members) have left. I won’t name them, but it’s open information. 5 of them were related to engineering.
This is concerning, especially when many concerns brought up relate to engineering new features or just engineering in general.
Technically there are records and staff acknowledging more than once on flags where staff got involved and a curator asked about temporary suspensions. Because in order to do a temporary suspension at the moment, you have to mark your calendar and hope you don’t forget to unsuspend.
Also if I did, I wouldn’t be able to vote for it since I’m out of votes. On the forums you can only vote 100 times I think, and I suppose there are more than 100 features requested not currently implemented I support.
The forum is - better managed by the paid Discurs service. I would wish for some nannying service to be applied to iNat itself. Also that you have to earn levels to be allowed to do things in the forum - whereas in iNat you can
Upload gazillion broken obs. Ignore polite (and repeated) requests to
add location
adjust location accuracy from ‘somewhere in this hemisphere’
read / respond to notifications (guilty as charged - it took me about a year to realise that notifications were meaningful - with info for me, or questions I should answer. I expected thanks for sharing)
You really should have to earn the ability to do more on iNat, step by step. Show yourself willing to learn and engage. Emptying your memory card on iNat, like tipping out a garbage bin - that should trigger a polite warning. You may not upload more obs, till you sort out your previous mess.
We will each have different pain points.
(See the string of forum posts objecting to Must Have 50 Verifiable Obs Before You Can … that is a really SMALL ask)
Since I appreciate the work of active curators - I would like better tools for them !
My first year on iNat was. Extremely. Bumpy. I remember a few iNatters snarling at me, ever so politely. Now I can see my mistakes from the other side and ‘snarl EVER so politely’ in turn. When I started blogging I had friendly and helpful bloggers to walk me thru the learning curve. We could use an Ask a Mentor interface on iNat. Not every newbie cares to be walked thru, whatever. But for those who would like to be mentored - if they are lucky, they join us on the forum - others flounder along. Or flee in despair, or been there done that next.
You can go back and retrieve earlier votes. Closed, Declined, already has lots of other votes, no longer interested in that - free up some so you can engage with fresh stuff as it comes in.
I did that already. I’m at the point where i have to weigh what I want to drop support for purely due to an arbitrary vote limit. Because iNaturalist is glacial (many years) at implementing feature requests, i have all my votes used.
I initially come from an anthropology background and one of the things you learn early on in that field is that designing a good survey is a lot harder and takes a lot more thought than most people realize.
Many people think it’s just as simple as coming up with a list of questions, but that’s just barely scratching the surface, and if that’s the approach you take you run the very real risk of getting the opposite of the information you’re actually after. People often don’t actually realize what they’re asking, and fail to properly understand the answers they’ve gotten.
This latter situation has been a critical one for my conservation organization as people who conducted the initial surveys on the species that’s our flagship species did a lot of local question asking and utterly failed to understand both the question they were asking and the answers they received, which has resulted in a quarter century of bad conservation and species information that has affected both local and national conservation policy, as well as international perception. The early informational mistakes that arose from this early survey are now so ingrained in the public and specialist perception that it’s nearly impossible to correct the bad info.
I very strongly feel that any organization that puts out a survey of any sort needs to spend the time to learn the details of how to properly conduct a survey and to understand what they actually want to know.