I recently posted about boundaries as I am updating an organization’s website to link to observations within a boundary. Some of what we are trying to do has been done by other contributors through other projects.
A project is much better than simply returning a observation-boundary, but I am concerned about a CRUD’ee future. CRUD of course if Create, Read, Update, and Delete. So, some CRUD’ee questions about whether to use a boundary (which seems to be pretty enduring) or a project (which might be more ephemeral).
BACKGROUND
Organization: Stewards of Alberta’s Projected Areas of Alberta (sapaastewards.com).
Scope of Work: 248 individual sites of Crownland spread over about 500 individual parcels.
Business Problem: Of the 248 sites, about half have been created already.
CREATE -Questions
Can we, en masse, be added as a curator for the areas for which we have interest?
Can you create a project and not be a curator?
How do you know if a project is a Collection or Traditional?
Were all Traditional projects migrated to a Collection, do I need to be concerned whether a project is Traditional or not?
Should my organization create an Umbrella project of our own and pre-existing projects notwithstanding the following questions?
Can projects be copied as the starting point for our own purposes?
Given that we are taking a holistic approach, should we re-create the existing Natural Areas and add the missing sites?
READ - Questions
Is the project link enduring? If the ABC project becomes the DEF project, will the link change?
UPDATE - Question
Who can post to the project journal, only the curator?
If the curator changes some feature of the project, e.g. expand/contract the boundary or focus, can different versions of the project be maintained?
While observations come into a project automatically, can a non-curator reference other information such as dumping, human disturbances, resource extraction applications, etc.? [this question is relevant to the boundary option as well].
Can curator ownership be transferred to another member?
Should our organization join each of the projects managed by someone else?
DELETE - Questions
A curator can delete a project, is there a notification process for both project-members or a flag for ‘project of interest’ to our organization?
Can deleted projects be recovered and transferred to a new curator?
I know this is a lot of questions but I only want to update the website once. Please be gentle, I am an iNaturalist neophyte and a volunteer webmaster.
I will tag a couple of iNatters in Alberta that I know personally. You might want to reach out to them. They will know other local iNatters who can help you @gpohl@wowokayyes
After renaming a project, the former URL of the project still links to the project (a bit surprising, but it seems that iNat manages this). And if a new project is named ABC, the URL of this second project ABC will be slightly different from the initial URL of the first project ABC (if I remember well what I observed).
In short, everything is well done.
It’s possible to automate adding yourself as a member of many projects (ask @rogue_biologist for the script), but a manager of the projects will have to manually make you a curator of the projects (as far as I know).
If you are a curator, a manager can make you a member (not anymore a curator).
Curators can remove observations from the project and their identifications are shown alongside the observations on project- specific views. Curators can also see the true coordinates of private and obscured contributions to this project.
Managers can do everything curators can do as well as editing project settings and write project journal posts.
The admin is the person who created the project. They can do everything managers and curators can do, as well as delete the project.
No, the previous specification of the project is lost.
Thank you once again Jean. Once I get the responses, I will post a summary at the end. The techie bits are a bit daunting as I am a front end kinda guy, lol.
It is not possible to automate elevating someone to curator from what I gather, or at least I hit a dead end.
If someone in your cohort is comfortable with Python I’d be happy to share the code, if not I can probably walk you through how to use it if you end up needing it via Teams or Zoom. It’s a little hacky, but it works.
Thank you all for your incredible enthusiasm and support. We are backing away from touching projects for 2025. We will instead reference existing and create new boundaries.
It was an interesting rabbit hole but when the build estimate started to climb into the hundreds of volunteer hours, cooler heads prevailed!
Unfortunately, we don’t have the skills to do technical-magic that would bring this number down. Nevertheless, we will back in a year or two. Step one, start to promote via our website the incredible work of iNaturalist through basic functionality. Add more integration in due course.
While observations come into a project automatically, can a non-curator reference other information such as dumping, human disturbances, resource extraction applications, etc.? [this question is relevant to the boundary option as well].
Not answered, experiment and report back to the forum
Can curator ownership be transferred to another member?
Easier to add and then delete curators from a project.
Should our organization join each of the projects managed by someone else?
A definite, maybe…
More research required to evaluate the benefits/costs
DELETE - Questions
A curator can delete a project, is there a notification process for both project-members or a flag for ‘project of interest’ to our organization?
Not answered but not likely
Can deleted projects be recovered and transferred to a new curator?
