i think it may be worth including commitments that iNat staff have made in previous statements, just to put those with items for consideration on one list. i didn’t go back and look at everything, but i seem to recall that you guys said that you would meet internally periodically to discuss these items and also reach out to various groups for additional guidance on this topic. i think that latter thing will be particularly important to achieve your goal here, since as far as i can tell, there hasn’t necessarily been a lot of participation / representation by disadvantaged BIPOC here.
i did a superficial scan of some existing / old threads just to see if there were things brought up in the past that are relevant here. there are some unresolved items that i mentioned over at https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/displaying-indigenous-lands-and-land-history-on-inat/13556/19.
there are also some things are closed at this point but may need a quick review to make sure the resolution is still appropriate:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/the-default-taxon-photo-for-homo-sapiens/5668
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/ok-symbol-policy/6832
… there may be others relevant threads, but there are a lot of threads to sift through. hopefully others can chime in if there are other threads that contain ideas that may deserve a quick review.
i was also thinking that there are some common guidelines for the community online, but it might be useful to develop some additional guidelines or tips for when observing out in the world. this is not to say that BIPOC need to be told how to behave properly, but it might be useful to understand what some common standards are across all cultures. i don’t really have a good concept myself of what such guidelines would look like, but just for example, if outreach to a particular indigenous group is successful, and all of a sudden there are a lot of interesting observations from that group’s land, i wouldn’t necessarily want random people seeing that to assume that it would be a good thing to take a day trip to go and take a look at the cool things out there, without considering how others might view that.
a couple of other thoughts related to process. first, i sort of see this initial effort as sort of the literature review or focus group phase of a much longer effort. it may be worth defining that the expected result of this phase of the effort will be, and what future next steps might look like (including timing), just to keep expectations aligned.
second, the way my mind works, it will only ever be known for sure whether meaningful change was achieved if you can measure before and after a change. so it may be worth starting to think about what things you might want to measure and how to measure them. i recall a past thread (https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/why-is-inat-male-dominated/6533) where the question of how to measure a problem was debated in length and even attempted by an entrepreneurial community member (https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/results-from-recent-brief-survey-of-inat-users/6697).
one more thing… i wasn’t sure that i wanted to even suggest this, but i guess i am making the suggestion just as something to consider: in the framework of iNaturalist, i think most projects are based on an interest – a taxon, a place, etc. i’ve seen a few projects created that are half interest / half identity, such as the young birders project. i wonder if there’s a model or even a place for a project or grouping mechanism based solely on identity (ex. black scientists)? in some ways, that seems like it could change the nature of the community and maybe fragment it, but i wonder if some might find that sort of thing desirable and even welcoming?