You said right that in your first post.
Why do you need followers at all if project catches all observations anyway? If you want to make people come to a place you do need to have some kind of relationship with them. Also not just ta someone but write how following project is a neeed thing, write it in each post.
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IDing and observing more will get you more followers. A lot of my followers I’ve barely interacted with but they decided to follow me, maybe because I helped them with an ID, or they thought something I found was cool and wanted to see what else I might find in the future.
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I’m new (if you can’t tell). But I too notice that the Projects are a bit lacking in features. For example, I’d expect at the very least that members of the project have a forum they can discuss the project’s needs, announce events, etc. Additionally, there’s a project for observations at a nearby preserve that seems to be pretty dead, likely due to lack of promotion (which I feel would need to be done outside of iNat because it is location-based project). I’d like to take over as admin (I’ll figure this out later).
So I suppose my ask is a little different from Anthony: Why don’t projects have their own forum section? It doesn’t necessarily have to be visible here, but should be available to members of the Project. If I start / take over a project then I can set up a forum elsewhere, but that would drive traffic away from iNat and would just cause a fragmented system to start (which is likely already the case).
As far as posting promotions of projects in the forums here. Why not? Moderation issues? Set rules. Many reddit and facebook user groups allow this only on specific days of the week. Often only under one forum posting. Projects are a great way to grow the user base of this software and grow the community. Community growth will require more moderation. It’s part of the growth cycle with any software with a social component.
I vote for a weekly Project promotion post to be open.
I vote for Projects to get their own forum section per project so the community for that project can communicate.
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Why would you need a forum section if all those things are discussed under project posts? To become an admin try contacting project creator.
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I did not see the project posts. The main project I’m in doesn’t have them so I missed that. Thanks.
However, these seem to be posted only by admins. They’re not an open forum where members of the projects can post. Or is that something else I’m not seeing. Looking at a few different projects I only see one person creating Journal Posts.
Moderators can post them, but it’s where people are talking about everything, active projects usually have lots of posts, if you think you’d like to be active as moderator of a project contacting owner is a good idea, in worst case if user is inactive you can create your own project for the same place.
I have a feeling that many people miss the journal posts of projects they are subscribed to - I certainly do. In principle the comments section on the journal post can be a good place to have a discussion. But I recognise the interest in a space for project members to initiate discussion. If this were developed I’d think it made more sense to attach it to the project rather than somewhere in the forum!
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I agree, it is more sensible to make projects’ community features more robust than to fracture the main forum.
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Lots of things to Ponder
I too am making a “project” infact this will the 'nth project - some are just statistical collations ones and some are active ones with members, some are closed. And am / have been part of other projects (example) Like this project
In all of them the common issue was / is effective communications with the group members. For smaller sized groups we (maybe) had existing communication channels, for bigger groups it has been a mess with multiple channels with related events becoming lost in the confusion of Whatsapp, emails and subscription based lists.
@ anthonywalton I understand your angst . While I don’t have any comments on your request would like to suggest searching for followers and observers in your community . Organizing walks and publicising them locally
in the district I live in - when we started on inaturalist there were very few observations - slowly we are helping people join (many are not English speakers, some are just reluctant). Its a long road but worth it.
And during the course of being on Inaturalist have met many interesting people who have helped id provided comments and have advised helped (esp. on the forum )
So would recommend hanging it and continuing to do the great job you are. Good never comes to naught.
cheers
I’ve been considering a feature request for a special tag called “@project-members” or similar which can be used in journals to highlight especially important posts. This would already help, but once notifications change and prioritize/highlight tags and conversation more, I’d hope that would allow the existing Project Journal feature to be far more effective. Is there interest in this?
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