What do you see as the benefit to combining the systems, as far as supporting indigenous people? In other words, what would it add for the people already in the non-iNaturalist system?
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A I mentioned above, an example would be the indigenous rangers groups. They’re already taking observations. They’re submitting them to a local database. And visa-versa - there are people in Australia who are submitting observations to iNaturalist. These experts could be sharing knowledge. But at the moment the iNaturalist system is designed so they must each individually join iNaturalist. Why? How does that help?
But what I’m also getting at here is a cultural shift - a way of expanding knowledge exchange so it’s more decentralised. (Happy to discuss more, but will let others speak)
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How is that including? It’s basically segregation.
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There are a lot of small group accounts like this on Inaturalist. They share observations and participate in Inaturalist’s community. I’ve even facilitated some of them. I’ve never seen one banned or asked to stop.
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So I haven’t had time to really dive into this thread so apologies if this is somewhat redundant but, I haven’t seen much about what the inat COMMUNITY can do. Since iNat Is largely operated by the community this may be more impactful than anything the small staff can do.
My recommendation on that note is to seek out users and projects in places with a high Black population and help with species ID. Related to the issue of iNat culture there’s a lot of frustration around the behavior of new users (cultivated plants, repetitive observations of common species, etc) but this can also come off as gatekeeping. Maybe the best thing we as users can provide the Black community is what we are best able to provide anyway - help with species ID when wanted, discussion, and engagement.
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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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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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