iNaturalist code seems to be more or less open source. back in the day, i had thought about ways to adapt the system for other purposes. i thought it would be nice to have a system that allowed you to capture random acts of kindness or other good events that you observed throughout the day. with enough data, you could see where good things were happening. but i suppose you could make a system that (also) captures observed injustices and cruelties. if you could systematically classify, catalog, and map such injustices, that might be a powerful tool to inform public discourse and policy. black kids getting harassed at a street corner by cops might never make it to the news, but maybe a cluster of 5 or 50 such observations recorded for all to see might help to advance the conversation?
that was sort of a tangent, but my main point is that given open source code and given that many of the jobs at iNaturalist are likely to involve coding, i bet if someone can demonstrate some familiarity with the code – either through helping with bug fixes or adapting the system for an entirely different purpose – that would give such a person a leg up when it came time to hire new staff.
i suppose you could ask iNaturalist staff to do a coding camp at a majority black school or something like that to help increase the probability that the person independently working on bug fixes is a black person, but i find that these kinds of asks are best received when some of the leg work has already been done (ex. “This school has a promising coding program, and this guy might be willing to donate a little money to support the effort. I wonder if you guys could go in and do a little coding camp for a few days?”).
another thought along the same lines: i thought back in the day that it might be fun to have a hackathon for iNaturalist. if you could intentionally invite enough BIPOC coders or SMEs to such an event, you might make some interesting connections and produce some interesting / useful results.