What can iNaturalist do to better support people of color?

It’s segregated now. For example, the indigenous experts on our system are unable to share knowledge with iNat now, right? Unless they join iNat?

But they already HAVE their own network. It’s not THEY who need to come to iNat. THEIR network doesn’t have any problem. It’s iNat that has the problem (which we’re discussing here); and one problem I’m pointing out is that it doesn’t allow open communication between networks.

Let me put it another way. Suppose you’ve been living in a rural part of Australia your whole life, and you’ve been studying the local nudibranchs for 30 years. You know the local names, the latin names, the behaviours, the phenology, etc. Imagine how it feels when someone in the US tells YOU that you’ve misidentified something - when you know you’re right.

I get this complaint from our local experts about iNat all the time.

Now this is just the surface of the issue. I feel like a lot of the proposals discussed above are great ideas - I’m 100% behind them. But I feel they’re only addressing the edges. When we talk about the study of nature, we’re talking hundreds of years of bad science (racist, yes, and therefore bad). From Joseph Banks to the Academies of Science to national museums to NatGeo, many of which, to their credit, have acknowledged past mistakes (although fail to anticipate present and future ones). So many brilliant, passionate people committed to studying the natural environment. Dedicating their lives to it and producing so much remarkable work.

But the science was only half-informed. Whole segments of knowledge were excluded because indigenous voices weren’t understood or respected.

Or worse - they became the objects of study themselves! And any knowledge they shared that was deemed useful was stolen for profit!

My father-in-law once visited me from India - it was his first trip outside India. During the stopover in London, he wandered away from the group of waiting passengers to take a look out the window. A security officer told him to stop and go back. He said to the officer, “Sir, your country ruled my country for nearly 200 years. I think I can take 10 seconds to gaze upon this city of yours I’ve heard so much about.”

He was obliged.

Here’s the thing. I think iNat has done amazing work. I have a deep respect for everyone involved. (Even pusim and charlie :-) - who I don’t know, and who seem to loathe me, but I know we share our time on this Earth together! How glorious is that!). But when you ask the question about supporting BIPOC, iNat/CAS/NatGeo tend to forget the imperial science they’ve inherited gets reflected in their system design - mainly US-centric designs models - and the way they operate as an organisation. The way the community thinks.

They create “instances” - or “nodes” - in other countries and talk about collaboration, but these are just re-skins of the centralised model. Locals are prevented from adapting the system to their needs (and I hope no one lectures me about open source code, or data repositories etc, which are totally different issues, although I’d be happy to discuss as well at another time). It’s still a centralised 1900s “London” point of view, asking itself, hm, how can we include more BIPOC. If it’s not willing to examining its fundamental structure, it’s kind of missing the point, no?

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Pisum - would it help if I changed my username from QuestaGame to Andrew? Can I? I’m an actual person. I’m happy to speak for QuestaGame (and correct a lot of the mistakes in your post), but I’m hoping to have a real discussion. I feel you’re thwarting that.

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Yes, I didn’t suggest otherwise. I certainly hope that once they’re on iNat you’re not banning them. That wouldn’t be good. I just posted another comment, maybe that will help explain. Thanks.

I agree with a lot of your points about interfacing with indigenous science, but I do have to say I don’t quite understand how the questagame revenue model was impacting how it worked with the iNaturalist community. Money really changes things and hopefully you can explain how all that was intended to work.

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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.

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15 posts were split to a new topic: Displaying indigenous lands and land history

If there were a public one it would be on the old Google groups forum (I know I saw first saw questagame observations posted that pre-dated this forum).

If there were any internal staff ones, we wouldn’t be privy to those.

Oh it’s a pipe dream to wish that iNaturalist and CAS were true public entities subject to FOIA on their internal emails.

Should we expect that? FOIA only applies to government-controlled records, and I don’t see anything about either iNat or CAS being public enterprises.

[Addendum: oops, that’s exactly what you said. Never mind.]

They are not public entities, so no, as I said, it’s a pipe dream to wish they WERE public. For me, the nexus that would make them a public entity is their use of public land for their building, and what I suspect is discounted rent for the use of that land. But public land and facilities being leased to private organizations and therefore being taken out of the public realm is a much bigger topic that’s way off base here.

Hehehe, no worries! =)

Or an iNat safety vest (with reflective stripes) that can go over whatever the observer is currently wearing?

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for those in the USA, and especially Texas, happy Juneteenth!

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I’m confused, if they have a separate network, how is a random iNat identifier able to identify their observations? If their observations were on iNaturalist, then that’s fair, and the observer would be able to respond and have a conversation and the identifier from the US would probably back off (and have learned something new about Australian nudibranchs). If the observation is in a separate program, then the US identifier probably wouldn’t be able to find and identify it, and perhaps keeping them separate is the best solution? Maybe I’m missing something.

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I think I remember hearing there was a site like that for street harassment and catcalls a few years ago (either pre #metoo or around the same time), so it could be done.

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probably this: https://www.ihollaback.org/. i tried to look up some stores on the website. it’s a little clunky. a lot of the stories in my area lead to broken links. better than nothing right now, but it could be amazing with a little love, i think. i think if someone really fixed this up and increased usership and awareness and then came over to iNaturalist and said, hey, give me a job, it would not be a difficult hire.

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Like having a cache of cameras people could use while in the field/foraging in an area without internet connectivity and also an “upload station” (library/civic center/cafe/etc with a free to use computer with a connection to the iNat website) that people could come to later to post the data?

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The advantage I see is being able to engage with the observer.

In the past, if I wanted to ask a question on a questagame observation (e.g. “do you want this observation to be for the flower or the insect?”), I would never get a reply.

I don’t know if they just didn’t want to talk to me (that’s valid, there are times I wouldn’t want to talk to me :wink:) or if there was simply no method of routing my comment to the user and then the user’s reply back to the observation.

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I, for one, as a member of the community interested in real answers to the posted topic question, am beyond irritated at this point that you, Andrew, have hijacked an extremely important thread to air what are largely your own personal grievances with the site. You’ve buried a handful of legitimate points in an avalanche of discussion irrelevant to the point of this one specific forum thread. I hope mods will again choose to move these off-topic posts to their own space. Call me cynical, but in a thread specifically, explicitly, and earnestly soliciting constructive solutions for BIPOC under-representation on and within iNaturalist, the majority of the words you have added to this conversation don’t seem centered around that goal. You clearly have an axe to grind, and I would respectfully ask not that you stop trying to grind it, but that you start grinding it in a separate, more appropriate space. Thank you.

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Everyone:

Please remember we are all on an international forum and the question is about support for more than Americans and more than “American issues.” Please explain U.S.-centric terminology when used and provide context for folks not in the U.S.

Also, please remember than none of us can be sure without meeting each other, the circumstances of other people’s lives, presentations, identities, struggles/traumas, socio-economic circumstances, levels of awareness and activism stance and that we don’t make assumptions about people except to assume they mean well both on the forum and main site.

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