Occasionally I receive emails from iNaturalist asking for a monetary donation. Since I am a contributor to the iNaturalist database, this request seems inappropriate. Maybe I am wrong, but I thought the primary purpose of iNaturalist was to create a worldwide biodiversity database that would be used by scientists, policymakers, etc to track biodiversity changes in time and space, now and into the future. This is a very valuable undertaking.
Why should I be asked to contribute not only my time and energy to expand the database, but also to pay for it? It seems the scientists or others who use the database as a resource to research and publish a paper should be the ones to pay for it. Am I wrong?
If I had to pay a fee to use iNaturalist as a contributor I would not do that and drop my participation.
I donât see what is wrong with a nonprofit soliciting donations, you are free to delete the email, they are not charging you a fee, just asking. If they send this to enough people, they will hit some who have money to spare and are interested in donation, helping to fund the mission to create a worldwide biodiversity database that would be used by scientists, policymakers, etc to track biodiversity changes in time and space, now and into the future.
I donate, because I like that iNat helps my engagement with nature and helps other people engage with nature in a way that, I think, increases the odds folks will try to protect it.
In addition to helping with engagement, iNat is secondarily really useful for community science and data collection â so any and all contributions, financial or not, are welcome!
Does the value you prescribe to your uploads enable the database to be maintained for the purpose you described indefinitely? Or is it something which has a value entirely unrelated to the actual real world monetary value generally required to produce and maintain a platform like iNaturalist?
You donât have to donate, it is after all optional (and therefore rather moot to complain that youâd rather quit than pay a fee).
At the very, very bottom of every such email from iNaturalist, there are hyperlinks I suggest exploring. âUnsubscribeâ reads one. âUnsubscribe Preferencesâ reads another.
You can make a choice about the emails you receive. But because others may wish to receive these emails, you should respect they may make different choices, including choosing to support iNaturalist. All about free choice really!
iNaturalist is a non-profit that does not get money from the data or services it provides. It needs money from somewhere. (Staff have to eat, for example.) I imagine it asks anybody who might possibly be interested in donating that money. Weâre obvious targets for such requests because weâre already donating our time, our pictures, and our knowledge. Clearly, we value what iNaturalist does (and/or find it fun). We donât have to donate anything to iNaturalist. Ignoring the requests for money is entirely legitimate, but I think iNaturalist asking us is also legitimate.
Hi,
i would consider myself able to speak for the scientific community, at least for entomology. Iâm a student, but Iâve seen many examples how scientists use iNaturalist data, including myself.
Biodiversity research is often not funded well, so I think scientists would stop using it if they had to pay for it. Many of them are also amateurs in the sense that they do it as a hobby and they arenât paid for their work. There are many entomological journals which publish almost only data from amateurs. Much of what we know about the diversity of insects and about their distribution is knowledge which has been generated by the amateur community! They collect data, they publish data, they even run their own small databases.
Also, in my opinion, iNaturalist is more a service towards non-scientists than towards scientists. iNaturalist data has a reputation of being unreliable, you have to know what you are doing if you are using it (sure there are many cases where it is extremely valuable, but you have to ask the right questions).
What I want to say is: iNaturalist data is extremely valuable, but i doubt that anyone would be able to make money with it. With your data you are generating value which cannot be translated into money, but money is still needed to run the infrastructure.
However, one thing which iNaturalist does extremely well, is that it allows people to get access to knowledge very easily. For me, the main benefit of iNaturalist to the world is that it makes nature identifiable for people who donât want to devote their live to doing so (by learning how to use complicated keys). For me, its more a service to the people than to the scientific community. Also, scientists are also devoting their time, if they spend hours identifying.
But you do not have to pay a fee. As others have mentioned, iNat is a non-profit organisation. I donât see a problem with a non-profit organisation asking for donations.
I do not think making observations is entirely one-sided. Most people (including me) wouldnât post their observations on iNat if it was. The observer benefits from the iNat infrastructure by their observations being put in front of volunteer identifiers who will identify the organism. Additionally iNat offers a ton of other features for the observer to make this more than just a database for researchers to use.
Much of science is underfunded as it is. Again, iNat is not only a database for researchers to use. If scientists would be the ones paying for iNat, though, then why should they finance all the other features?
Also, this way, there is nothing stopping you from using the data. You can use iNat data to âdo scienceâ as well. Science doesnât have to be limited to universities and institutionsâŚ
Advertisers are already building virtual profiles of everyone who buys anything, anywhere.
So far, this process has been unbelievably incompetent, and results in things like this: advertisers basically flushing money down the toilet by harassing people who have no interest in the product or service.
But, it is getting better all the time. I personally look forward to the day when every billboard, every ad on the side of a train, etc. is for a product or service that I might be potentially interested in (accurate targeted advertising).
(Mods, this post DOES apply to iNat, although it is also a broader comment about digital marketing)
It seems to me that iNat also provides a service to observers, does it not?
Most people do not participate on iNat with the sole goal of providing data for scientists.
One of the central goals of iNat is helping people engage and connect with nature, and I suspect most of us participate on iNat first and foremost because we enjoy it. iNat has a fantastic technical infrastructure that allows us to create records of encounters with nature that we find meaningful, along with all sorts of options for searching and sorting these records. And it also provides access to resources that help us identify what we saw, both in the form of iNatâs computer recognition model and a community of knowledgeable users.
Developing, maintaining, and hosting this infrastructure is not free. It is not unusual for websites to ask users to help contribute to these costs in some form â at least, if they choose not to cover their expenses in other ways, such as sponsored content or advertising.
Just about any social media-type website that incorporates large amount of content (photo sharing, crafts, gardening, books, cooking, etc.) eventually has to make decisions about this. I much prefer iNatâs strategy of asking for voluntary contributions rather than, say, a model where users would have to have a paid subscription for more advanced features, or a model where it is impossible to use the website without encountering a constant barrage of ads and targeted content.
Itâs not a fee that you have to pay, theyâre just asking for the money because iNat is a non-profit that has no way of getting money to fund the site otherwise.
I look forward to the day when billboards and ads arenât a thing anymore. Hyper-targeted ads like these sound more like a dystopia to me than anything
Exactly, Iâd much rather donate to iNaturalist and help maintain it as the community it is, than see ads, or have my data and photos used to train commercial AI models, or have records of where Iâve been when being cross-linked to other online databases and sold. Donations (including some large ones by those who see the value of what iNaturalist does) are a way to avoid the classic tech trap of âif itâs free, youâre the productâ.
Which has exactly nothing whatsoever to do with an email politely asking if youâd be willing to kick in a few (pick your currency).
As a non-profit with limited resources iNat is only able to expand and improve its interfaces, data storage and retrieval, staffing and whatnot if it finds new cash somewhere. It would be plain stupid of them not to fundraise from the community they serve.
Data creation is one function of iNat but the data are created by drawing in a large community of folks interested in nature and interested in learning about nature. As is made clear all sorts of places in the iNat website, at its heart iNat is about promoting interest in , knowledge of and understanding of biodiversity. By doing that it generates useful information that is freely available to anybody who wants to use it. If thatâs not something you want to contribute to, thatâs fine. Nobodyâs making you.
This is a basic principle of non-profit fundraising: People who have donated previously have already demonstrated that they value what you offer and are interested in supporting it. Some of them will welcome the opportunity to provide further support.
If a for-profit business did this, it would be sketchy, I agree. But for a non-profit, itâs not just standard, itâs widely considered a best practice. It would be irresponsible non-profit management not to do it.
Really, I think anyone who uses or contributes to iNat ought to strongly consider donating something to support itâeven a small amount. Just like wikipedia, iNat has become a great resource and community for anyone to learn about biodiversity where they live or globally.
Scientists who use iNat data for biological and conservation research arenât making money off their research; they make their research publicly available for free and are doing a public service by dedicating their lives to creating knowledge. Most are underpaid and could probably be making lots more money if they sold out and worked for a big corporation.
And it can be an extremely toxic one ⌠(though I donât think the inat âwe also need money to survive and growâ messages that Iâve seen fall into that category).
When you gift a one-time donation to some seemingly worthy cause, and then have to watch the proportion of that which they spend on hounding the bejesus out of you to keep giving even more, and how theyâll sell your contact details down the river for other âpartnersâ to then hound you too - the collateral damage caused by putting doing that on to peopleâs ânever, ever, ever, againâ list, and spreading the story of that nightmare to all their peers, can be immense.
The inner circles of Professional Begging businesses, which some fund raising organisations engage for a tiny share of the actual money raised in their name, might consider that Best Practice (because the toxic fallout isnât one of their measured kpiâs), but it certainly doesnât make it a Good one.
I donât think inat has been sucked into this trap - thereâs a very big difference between making it clear How you can donate if you wish to and trying to guilt you into doing so - but its efforts at quietly soliciting donations are also part of the collateral damage that spreads from this practice - so portraying it as Business as Usual, and the people who have come to abhor it as somehow Out Of Touch, probably isnât the Most Effective way to get them to give more than they already do âŚ
Authoring a research publication doesnât earn you royalties to pay for stuff, quite the opposite is true. Scientists usually have to pay to publish papers. There are page fees etc. It can cost you several thousand dollars to publish a research article, especially if you care about open access.
Also, iNaturalistâs primary goal is to connect people to nature. While it can be and certainly is used for research, that is secondary to being âan online social network of people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature.â
Personally, I have a lot of pictures on iNatâs servers and from using photo sharing/storage services Iâm keenly aware that you usually have to either pay or put up with ads (since on the internet typically if youâre not paying for a product, you are the product being sold to advertisers). I appreciate the fact that iNaturalist does not present us with ads and Iâm happy to donate to keep it that way.
