Regionnal sub-forums?

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1

Why not have forum spaces dedicated to a given location?

Right now, if you want to interact with users in your country/district/city.., people are spread all over the internet. (Fictionnal examples: #InatUK on Mastodon, Inaters of Ghana on FB, #NewYorkParkLovers on Instagram, INaturalist Seoul on Reddit..)

Having such spaces here would increase connections between people (in addition to connecting people with nature), which is in line with Inaturalist being one of the nicest place on the internet.

Exchanging local tips, meeting up, finding local experts, sharing local news, organising events, reporting issues, gathering for educational or conservation purposes.. There is a lot of uses for local forums here.

2

see https://taiwan.inaturalist.org/pages/about-taiwan

3

In theory, I like the idea of:

In practice,

Generally, splitting a community into smaller regional communities works well when you have a massive userbase, so that it’s hard to even read a thread, because it’s quickly buried by an avalanche of new threads. At the moment, the iNat Forum is pretty far from that level of usage.

4

I think it is a role the numerous iNat regional networks could play, and perhaps some of them already do.

https://www.inaturalist.org/sites/network

Also, perhaps the global forum has relatively few active users because it does not facilitate the issues many iNat users want to discuss.
For example, I think it would be useful to have regional fora that facilitate the discussion on regional species. If you try to discuss species on the forum your are quickly told to use iNat itself. However, iNat is not setup to do that. Often general species-level information gets buried in specific observations, or personal journal pages that don’t really facilitate a discussion, or curatorial flags that few see. I realise the AI project is intended to leverage some of that content, but a regional taxonomic forum would be less contentious. I can envisage useful sticky-posts about “why are these observations species X and not species Y?”

5

I’m not against the idea, but it would require a huge amount of moderation and support, which iNat’s not capable of. However, anyone is welcome to make an unofficial Discord, Subreddit, Facebook group, etc., like iNat Taiwan has. You can run it and moderate how you like.

6

A possibility is to attach fora to projects, delegating moderation to project administrators.

7

Thanks for your answers.

Maybe a first step could be to create a country-level sub-forum for the most active place (USA region I guess) so that moderation and support is possible, and see how things go?
Maybe after a while some states will want their own section, and so on.. that way, places would appear progressively in the forum, along with demand and potential moderators..

8

To me, setting up a “USA” subforum anywhere feels perhaps redundant; the iNat forums already feel pretty USA, then Canada, centric. This is not a criticism, it is just how it is, and understandable given iNaturalist started in California.

Unlike for other places, there is not a need for a separate forum on the basis of language and/or geographical remoteness. In fact,

Exchanging local tips, meeting up, finding local experts, sharing local news, organising events, reporting issues, gathering for educational or conservation purposes.

sounds unwieldy across a national subforum for such a geographically large and diverse country as the USA.

I think about how parts of southern Florida have more in common with my part of Mexico than, say, Idaho. Parts of upstate New York are more akin to neighboring places in Canada than to Arizona. It’s just not one homogeneous country, which is why it is beautiful.

This is to say that many conservation issues, specialist knowledge areas, or event planning ought to consider inclusion of broader geographic areas, perhaps, to have the best chance of impact, reach the most people, find the best specialists.

(Fictionnal examples: #InatUK on Mastodon, Inaters of Ghana on FB, #NewYorkParkLovers on Instagram, INaturalist Seoul on Reddit..)

I am extremely confused why you needed to make these up if true ones exist. But even so, I note these examples are of much smaller places than USA.

If you choose to do so, I very much wish you well, I just think it sounds overlarge at the national level given the USA’s size, and so I might encourage “bitesize” first (town or city etc) as well as considering including nearby areas when appropriate and/or useful.

Good luck!