Thanks eric_hunt. Yes, money absolutely changes things. Especially for BIPOC. (My wife has written a lot about this issue; she’d speaks to it better than I can; happy to send you her work). The idea of people collecting data for free - and having the free time and resource and economic privilege to do so - is very much related to race. It’s why “citizen science” is such a foreign concept in so many countries. (I understand this may be a controversial thing to say in a forum like this one, where everyone’s heart is in the right place, but I hope it will be received with an open mind).
Here in Australia, you’re talking about communities that have been terribly oppressed. First Nations people here die 10 years younger than other communities. There’s something amiss when governments give money to an Institution to run a citizen science project, which supports an academic department for all their data science, but the on-the-ground providers of the data get nothing.