I’m more wondering what you folks envision than envisioning anything myself. When I first joined I didn’t know what iNat was and have since come to think of iNat as a graduate project that went viral and took everybody involved by surprise. It seemed to me that it exploded before anybody really had time to think about what sort of administrative structure would work best, never mind getting a realistic strategic planning process in place.
The national partnerships have always puzzled me a bit. On the surface they appear to be local versions of the partnerships with NG and the California Academy, which raises questions (at least for me) about what the lines of responsibility, accountability and control look like in the new iNat structure.
I’ve reported to and served on a number of not-for-profit and charitable boards. I’ve seen crazy ideas succeed and apparently bullet-proof concepts die horrible deaths. When you tease them apart, the good and bad outcomes pretty much all come down to money, planning, management systems and the team. Every organization has its own mix of competencies; from the outside, iNat’s strongest suit appears to be its team.
iNat isn’t making massive numbers of cutting edge widgets, it doesn’t employ hundreds of thousands, it isn’t administering multi-billion dollar budgets but it is seeking to engage a very large number of people in a lot of places and it is endeavouring to generate a large pile of data points that are usable for actual research. It’s not Amazon but what it does is complicated enough to make management challenging; If the organization continues to grow like anything even vaguely resembling recent history, structures are going to matter.
So I’m curious.