Hey everyone,
Just wanted to give you an update about the Penang project. @carrieseltzer and I chatted with the organizers via video for about an hour yesterday, California time. They were incredibly nice, gracious, and apologetic about what they describe as the “havok” this project created, the scale of which took them totally by surprise. Some quick takeaways:
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the purpose of this project was to encourage the kids to get outside and take notice of the living things around them, and I do believe this was accomplished, although it was detrimental to those of us who were wading through the observations. I do think that’s important to remember. They said the kids had a lot of fun and were seeing many things they’d never noticed before.
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they disseminated documents, including how-tos that told the kids to take photos of wild organisms, to not use computer vision suggestions and instead make high-level IDs, etc. but apparently this message was lost and/or misunderstood by some students. Also some of the teachers who were not directly involved apparently gave advice such as “go photograph vegetables in markets.” So kind of like a game of telephone, the message became garbled. We’ll be reviewing those documents so we can provide feedback.
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while there was a tangible prize involved, the organizers believe most of the students weren’t aware of it and were instead motivated less by a tangible prize and more by wanting to just do well (we were assured no grades were involved) and due to competition between the two school districts in the area. I’m paraphrasing but the organizers told us that in the area it is very important to do what teachers ask you to do and to excel.
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moving forward with the actual City Nature Challenge, they won’t be promoting it in secondary schools but more to the general public and to college students, especially those studying biology. They’re also going to try and recruit biology students and other local experts to ID observations in the project as practice for CNC and to help clean up the data from this event. The upside to all of this is that we have a lot of data now and, if properly identified, can help iNat a) train its vision model on species more prevalent in Asia so it’s more accurate there and b) know which species are likely to be captive/cultivated in Penang.
My two my main conclusions after this conversation are:
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There are things iNat can do with code, design, and messaging to mitigate similar events (I doubt we can prevent them totally), and we’re looking into them. If you have ideas, please post them in General or make a concrete feature request.
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It is incredibly important to always keep the “assume people mean well” Community Guideline in mind. I know some frustrations were vented by iNat users, and I was frustrated as well, but if there were any insults or put-downs directed at the organizers or participants, they were unwarranted. I also apologized on the community’s behalf if they received any untoward messages and the organizers were very gracious. The vast majority of folks involved in the event acted in good faith and the organizers were quite willing and open to discussing the issues with us.