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?