I totally agree with this.
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Adding a bit more context here: while there have been lots of conversations with the iNat network about evolving and improving how we all work together, we are not planning to disband the network in any way.
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I would like to follow up on this because another curator reached out to me and it further illustrates the need of action from staff in my opinion. I just learned for the first time an example of a curator forgetting to unsuspend a user from what should have been a temporary suspension. Unfortunately I learned it was actually me and I really have no excuse other than Iâm human, not perfect, and can make mistakes. When the responsibility to unsuspend someone from a temporary suspension is put on the curator rather than being automated. It opens the possibility of human error. What should have been something like a 3 day suspension ended up being over a month, so who knows if the user is interested in coming back.
Many thanks to fellow curator @karthik_83 for alerting me.
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We all must remind ourselves that weâre only human and fallible, and not be too harsh. : )
All platforms must allow for people to make mistakes, learn from them. Of course here we all owe the user a huge apology for goofing up.
As youâve said, one of the learnings here is that there must be tools that cover for our lapses, so an automated system of unsuspension would be helpful. Until that happens, letâs perhaps clearly mention the duration of suspension under a flag (or elsewhere) so that any other curator can follow up too.
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The 2 we hear from are the ones with social media in their portfolio ? And we do get feedback from engineers where appropriate. e bird responses here say their staff is not even named. We live in a strange world in strange times, AI and iNat is a soft target. Next week we have warships from 4 visiting countries practicing gunnery exercises in False Bay. It is called âWill for Peaceâ. Porpoises and dolphins out there.
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Good communication is clear, relevant, timely and comprehensive, or at least aims to be. Of course there is information that cannot be shared and things that still needs to be worked out. No communication is always a bad strategy.
When advertised features work, expectations raised by promotions (like âCrowdsource your identificationâ) are met, user base and staff are retained thatâs a success. Keeping the lights on is a big achievement as well.
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I explicitly stated that the community is created and maintained by its users. But we arenât responsible for creating and maintaining the iNaturalist organisation itself, and we cannot influence decisions in the same way that e.g. shareholders normally would do. (I probably shouldnât have used the term âstakeholderâ, since that often has a much broader meaning than someone who simply has a financial stake in an enterprise). As non-paying users of a service that provides no warranty whatsoever, we cannot hold the organisation accountable for its actions. However, as creators and maintainers of the community, we are accountable to each other, and we have a great deal of power and influence within that context.
Well, of course I would, since thatâs the topic of this thread - i.e. âis the iNat directorship taking iNat in the right direction and paying enough attention to its user-baseâ. Since the rest of the OP is very light on details, I have attempted in several posts to tease out what the two halves of this question might actually mean in practice. Unfortunately (and perhaps predictably), many of the replies to those posts have ignored all the nuance and instead settled on a simplistic black and white interpretation: i.e. âany communication is always goodâ vs âno communication is always badâ.
As a UK citizen that endured the Brexit omnishambles, I find some of the responses here laughably naive. Asking people what they think is most definitely always a highly risky endeavour. Itâs never simply a matter of âall discussion is good discussionâ. In reality, any important insights will often be quickly drowned out by a slurry of misinformation, half-baked conspiracy theories, and outright lies, much of which is promulgated by people who should know better. Unstructured, open-ended consultation almost inevitably leads to a rapid race to the bottom. This is why most democratic societies are based on some form of representative democracy, rather than direct democracy.
If youâre really interested in improving communication, itâs not enough to simply claim that more is always better. Thatâs just assuming something youâre trying to prove. The details matter. Having an actual plan matters.
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While this has been stated multiple times, I donât think itâs possible to overstate the importance within. Valuing this group and acting on their needs must be a high priority for iNat to continue to exist in a useful way.
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We must be reading different threads, because this is not what I have seen happening here.
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Certainly, advertisers worked out in the mid-twentieth century that it was counterproductive to ask consumers what they preferred; they didnât know, or they lied. Advertising then pivoted to getting consumers to buy products through psychological manipulation.
Your point about politics at a national level is apt. In liberal democracies, gaining power now relies on promising voters more of what they think they want (or scaring them into believing the other side will have them lose it). Making good policy with a view to the long-term future is not part of the picture. Responses to the climate and biodiversity crises form Exhibits A and B.
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hey can you pls explain your 2nd point, I understand the others but havent heard of this yet :)
im sorry if theres an explain below somewhere but I havent finished reading yet
I donât like to assume malice instead of incompetence but as an identifier that survey felt like an attempt to claim to care while having intentionally bad survey design.
As other users have mentioned surveying is challenging and when not done properly can give results that are contrary to the groups sentiment. It is easy to inadvertently release a bad survey to cover your ass and claim to listen while not actually following through with those users complaints.
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Iâm very concerned about data being used to train AI id (is this one of the recent changes and the new direction?). I do not want any of my photos to be used to train AI. Is there a way to prevent this?
Are you referring to the iNat CV (computer vision) system, or to iNat data being used to train other AI systems that are not associated with iNat?
If itâs the CV system, the thin that offers a suggestion when you make an observation, that has been part of iNat from the very start and is foundational to iNat.
If itâs about non-iNat AI⌠unfortunately, at this point pretty much everything online gets scraped and stolen by them and to my knowledge there isnât a lot that can be done about that, but itâs not something that iNat participates in or condones.
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The computer vision has existed since 2017. https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/computer_vision_demo
This is different from the generative ai comment summarizer which is new.
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If I want to coordinate with other identifiers to work on a particular taxon (e.g., to clean up wrong IDs) there are very limited tools on iNat that we can use to organize our activities (plan how to divide up the task, share information, determine which observations have already been looked at by someone competent, etc.).
In cases where a taxon is difficult to ID from photos and/or is frequently mis-IDâd, the metric of âneeds IDâ vs âRGâ canât be used as a way of prioritizing which observations need to be looked at. Other available filters are unwieldy or they may not work well when multiple users are involved. There is no possibility to collaboratively develop identification guidance (e.g. the oft-cited desire for wiki-style taxon info pages) and no good format for holding group discussions.
While some people have been successful using projects for this purpose, projects wonât work well for every need. Other people use external apps for coordination and discussion, which requires that people all agree on what app they are comfortable using.
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Honestly, I feel strange reading your post. Iâve been using INat nonstop for two years, but Iâm only now learning about some issues and the active discussions on the forum. Maybe itâs because I live tens of thousands of kilometers from INat headquarters and donât speak English.
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It would be possible to switch to another platform that would be more responsive to user feedback and provide a higher-quality service. But this is impossible because there is no alternative to INat, there is no other social network like it. INat is essentially a monopolist, free to ignore competition from other platforms. So why does INat âs management need feedback if they know its active users have nowhere to go? Especially if theyâre deaf to their own employees. Especially if theyâre deaf to the platformâs co-founder.
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Such is the problem of managing a herd of cats. Itâs an impossibility. Best that iNaturalist provides a versatile platform of great quality that users can adapt to their individual wishes. It does that for me although it took a while to figure out how in some cases, for example, what to do with species that canât be characterized from photographs or are likely unnamed. Projects were ultimately the solution. Sure iNat could make some specific tasks easier, but attempting to be all things to all people could ultimately put it in a position of doing nothing well.
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Thatâs not true. At the outset iNaturalist was much more community focused. People identified for each other. That decreased regrettably once the CV became the focus after 2017.
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