My two cents is that you can’t think like this. You will drive yourself crazy. Take a career change, for example. Where you change from a high-paying job that you hate, to a lower-paying job that is way more fulfilling.
Every day that you’re not working at your old (but more lucrative) job, you might calculate how much money you’re losing (you are constantly calculating the financial opportunity cost).
The economic value of any contributions I make to iNat is zero, and I find that perfect. Commodification is one of the great evils of industrial society.
What I do at iNat is voluntary. It is not work - or I would have a target, and a manager monitoring that target. Maybe for a scientist who IDs bugs all day, IDing MORE bugs on iNat is equivalent to unpaid work - but - it is voluntary. Unless it is part of your job description ?
I don’t consider what I do for iNaturalist work, for me it is a hobby that I enjoy and I feel happy contributing to science. There is a monetary cost for me to enjoy this hobby but that goes for all hobbies (equipment, phone, fuel etc)
Same as how my work calculates the value of volunteer labour, for reporting to local govt organisations:
Minimum wage in Aotearoa is $23.50 so if iNaturalist had to pay someone to do the work I do then it would be, at minimum, $23.50 per hour that they would have to pay.
For skilled labour, that is increased by 1.5x, to $35.25. I’d suggest that identification work would fall under skilled labour.
I agree with your overall point. (Although I think I interpreted Pisum’s post and comments differently). And personally, I hate the whole idea of ascribing a financial value to my time. How would I even do it?? I had a job that paid me 80€/h. My „regular“ job pays 13.98€/h am I now losing 66.02€ every hour I work in my normal job and 80€/h when I don’t?
Also, I found a 20€ bill once. Took me 2 seconds to pick up. So is my value as a professional money-picker-upper now 36000€/h? Am I actually losing 35986.02€/h??
I‘d prefer a project/product based salary („I‘ll pay you xyz for that thing you made or for doing this service for me“), but that’s sadly not our current system works (mostly).
„Fun“ fact: My first job included uploading my professor‘s (already identified) pictures to iNat. (He‘s got some good photos of rare species that he wanted to make publicly available.) I also got 13.98€ per hour doing it (standard university pay for undergrads at my uni), and I didn’t like it one bit. I actually sort of quit iNat for a time as well because I didn’t want to see the upload screen anymore. So I don’t actually want my iNatting to be paid. All this to say that I fully agree with @afdexter, I guess. Haha
A more interesting question might be ‘how much does one of your observations cost you?’ Camera, batteries, gas, travel expenses? I’d shudder if I actually put pen to paper.
I do not think of my time devoted to iNat in terms of monetary value passed from myself to the organization, but rather as a collaboration from which we all derive mutual benefit. The value of my being here actually passes primarily in the opposite direction, that is, from the organization to me.
I agree that I don’t personally want to think of most of my time on iNat in terms of monetary value or as “work”. To quote Calvin, “It’s only work if somebody makes you do it.” I might retitle the thread “What is the monetary value of your activity on iNat?” if I were framing it.
Some (fairly small) proportion of my time spent on iNat is related to my work and “on the clock” (looking at herp observations in the state that employees me, using that data for work projects, etc.)
Some of my time on iNat (some curator stuff, some forum mod, some IDing) I think of as service broadly (it’s something I might otherwise not do for personal gratification if I didn’t feel like it benefited the community at large.)
Some of my time on iNat is really just for me (observing, some IDing, some curating/mod) that I would do regardless.
Thinking of the monetary value of those times is really only useful to me personally in the first case and there, minimally - it’s just something that I could calculate if I needed to, like to justify that creating good quality data via iNat is cheaper than me doing fieldwork to make it.
But I also understand that, with the way that non-profits and other entities work in the U.S. at least, they often need to calculate some measure of the value of their work and their users’ activity. This is how they express their value to donors and other entities and make match which is required for many grants. I have zero problem with iNat doing this. Sometimes it feels like a silly system (though I think the overall goal of documenting match is in the right place), but it’s a system iNat and other orgs have to participate in from a pragmatic point of view. In this sense, I have no problem with someone assigning a reasonable value to my iNat activity based on standard practices to support iNat’s work/mission (or those of other projects I might contribute to on iNat). It’s a secondary benefit to my activity and magnifies the impact of whatever I do on iNat.
On a side note, this previous thread provides some good context as well:
Agreed. Society does derive lots benefit from iNat, so it is fair for society to provide this mechanism for enabling iNat to operate. That mechanism can coexist with one’s not viewing time devoted to iNat as a cost, provided that one derives mostly pleasure from doing the work.
Some charities get a “match” in funding if they provide proof of money coming in. Volunteer work counts as “money” for some notable organizations that provide matches, like, idk… The US federal government. Maybe I’m missing the whole point of this, but I work at an organization where this is a significant funding source for us, so getting things people were doing anyway documented as “volunteer work” (even if they don’t really see it that way) is literally a way for my org to make money. If iNat wants to apply for a “match” like that, then calculating how much time it took for each ID to be added and the monetary value of that could be important for them now or in the future
Agreed. I used to to do catalogue work for a well known toy company for free for many years and I never attached value to it, but when the company itself started to go off course and do all sorts of weird things, like trying to work out a compensation model for free work, I called it quits. Not everything in life is about money. More people should read Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Kimmerer…
Besides anything else, the life form I’m contributing allows me to take a picture for free, does not require me to contribute water, food or shelter in exchange for posing and being groped and pulled this way or that at some ungodly hour and freely shares its beauty and life for all to enjoy.
Value of my contribution = I honestly do not know, do not care and do not want to waste my time calculating it
Value of my knowledge gained in exchange for my contribution = Absolutely priceless
Value of the friendships made and people I meet online because of my contribution = Absolutely priceless
Increased happiness and fitness = Much cheaper and more beautiful surroundings than (ugh) a sweaty gym subscription (a year ago I could not squat for any money in the world - now I’m a champion squatter)
As a contributor and sometimes ID’er, I somehow think I get more out though, but again, I’m not interested in doing any of those kind of calculations…
I would like to be paid for my IDs on iNat. Who will pay me?
**crickets chirping**
It sounds like there is no economic demand for this work. Therefore, its monetary value is zero. I could imagine hypothetical situations where someone has a demand for this work, and fantasize about what they’d pay me in this imaginary alternate reality, but I honestly don’t see the point. I can classify, authenticate, and date any Eagle Scout patch based on the embroidery, base material, and thread types, which is a very uncommon skill. I imagine someone might pay me handsomely for this service. I also imagine unicorns would be striped like zebras if they existed…
