Hi @harlem_naturalist! I’m Abhas, the UX designer for iNaturalist, and I’m currently doing some research to help improve the user experience for first-time users on iNaturalist. If you’re available, I’d love to chat with you and hear about your experience onboarding folks onto the platform.
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@carrieseltzer @tiwane
What has been done so far? In terms of conversations, data collection, mentions, etc., do you feel you have taken any successful steps towards greater diversity and inclusion in the last four-five months? Or at least, what have you been doing to try?
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I was just about to say the very same thing. Is anyone besides Questagame’s spokesperson saying that allowing group accounts will be a solution to this problem? If so, I missed it.
That is an awesome idea. I can tell you, having been exposed to “nature books” mostly written by white people, I know there is a lot I am missing. Edwin Way Teale was a great nature writer; but it is sad that I can’t think of any names of black, Hispanic, or Native naturalists from his time period.
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Thanks for the prompt, @astra_the_dragon. I can share our progress so far.
- To ensure that the taxon photo associated with Homo sapiens is more broadly representative of human diversity, @abhasm designed a composite image for it using photos from Unsplash. Unlike nearly all other taxa, the ability to edit the default photo for humans is locked. (Previously, the default photo for humans was frequently changed, and often set to Darwin or Linnaeus).
- To prevent the appearance of negative or potentially racist comparisons between humans and other organisms (especially in the context of Seek, which uses taxon photos from iNaturalist and places it next to the photo you took), @abhasm also created image composites for all of the ancestral taxa to humans (Primates, Mammals, Animals, etc.). Like for humans, only staff can edit photos for those taxa.
- @kueda and other engineers removed the terms master/slave and whitelist/blacklist from our codebase, to the extent possible (it may remain in some other software we rely on).
- Staff now meet monthly specifically to advance these issues and ideas on a regular basis.
- @alex has been researching methods to detect bias in machine learning on images of humans.
- The international Network Members have been asked to report annually on their activities to reach groups of people who are underserved by/underrepresented in science, conservations, and/or iNat.
- @tiwane and I have reached out to Outdoor Afro and Latino Outdoors about how we can support their communities of outdoor enthusiasts.
- @tiwane has made a concerted effort to feature more BIPOC iNat users in blog posts, including residents of many countries, rather than tourists from North America and Europe, nearly all of whom are BIPOC. Some examples are here, here, here, and here.
- We had some funding specifically to experiment with advertising for Seek. One of the demographics we targeted ads to on Facebook was people who were affiliated somehow with historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs).
- We’re working on ways to improve the onboarding of new uses to make it more accessible and easier to understand. @abhasm has been interviewing several iNat enthusiasts about how they orient new users to iNaturalist.
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This is great to hear. Thank you.
Maybe you can write up a blog post and/or news Forum post so as to reach a larger number of iNatters. Periodic followups would be fantastic, even if it’s only two or three times a year :)
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