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Why I left iNaturalist

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Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#161

Post by jg0r3 »

MattBlissett wrote: post #91
jg0r3 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in a large conservation organization focused on rare plant conservation. iNaturalist is sometimes used by our ecologists/biologists as a starting point for collating occurrence data. The iNaturalist data itself is likely specifically being pulled from gbif. Then they go private/specialty databases that have more spatially and taxonomically accurate records. But iNaturalist data is often not considered high qua…

GBIF track the use of data we provide to scientists, where they later publish papers citing that data [1]. For iNaturalist, the list of known citations is at [2]. In most cases a download of data from GBIF will include data from more than one dataset (iNaturalist is one of over 110,000). To find how particular records in a download were used — or even if they were discarded — requires reading the paper. As an example…

Ah, what a wonderful role. I'm sad I've missed the application period, maybe one of the only jobs in tech I'm specifically qualified for :(.

I should add the asterisk that my anecdotes on the presumed legitimacy of publishing solely iNaturalist data comes from conversations I've had in the American endangered/threatened plant conservation community. More common or non-American species occurrence data from iNaturalist likely has more legitimacy being used directly in publications.

In the US we have a series of government/NGO controlled databases that house sensitive species data, so often our scientific community has to operate through them to get access to publishable information (of which the raw data is then often obscured, just used for analytics). In my experience iNaturalist data is often a good starting place for determining which government bodies/NGOs a biologist should start reaching out for requesting data access.

I love GBIF and have a priority this year of making sure that my organization plugs-in what we're willing to share via IPT or Biocase!

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#162

Post by mmooss »

tristor wrote: post #152
mrguyorama wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You specifically need a culture that considers "Unskilled labor" to be an oxymoron. Where a literal assembly line worker feels like they have enough expertise to say "No, this is a problem worth stopping production over". American car companies for example have always preferred to just keep the line moving and have a later QA step fix up the problem, or literally push the problem onto the dealer. You need to treat ev…

> Yet Japan DOES have a strictly hierarchical work culture, where openly countering something your boss says isn't exactly welcome. So I wonder how this sort of "Trust your employees to have good ideas" thing came about. What happened is that they bought into the Edward Deming viewpoint of Total Quality Control (TQC), and instituted this throughout their business in a way which melded correctly with their culture, ul…

> once they had committed they expended every necessary effort until the thing was done

That's too simplistic to describe the reality of humanity. Whatever Toyota's discipline, it's a matter of degree and they have challenges implementing it.

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#163

Post by AlexeyBelov »

teiferer wrote: post #78
patcon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that I can see plainly that he wasn't interested in certain ways of running the organization, but also... Why do startup people get to talk about their fuckups, and we call it wise and honest and we celebrate the failures -- we certainly don't condemn the very idea of hierarchy or capitalism. But when someone doing something interesting or non-hierarchical talks about their fuckups, we talk about how misguide…

He is not being criticized for talking about his fuckups but for ranting endlessly about how other people were not doing what he wanted, putting the blame squarely on them.

Does not seem like a rant to me, just a description on what happened and when / how. What parts seem ranty?

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#164

Post by rvba »

mrguyorama wrote: post #151
rvba wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla the one which: * lost market share of its product from 30 to 2% * spends money on fun projects and acqusitions that generate no revenue, while taking away what the users wanted (addons, extensions, customizing) since supposedly this is hard to do * spends money on politics instead of core product And many more You should read a business book too. Focusing on core product (firefox) should be top priority, espe…

What do business books say you should do when the primary way you lose your market is illegal and anti-competitive business practices from a megacorp in a political environment anathema to punishing anti-competitive business practices? Please tell me how Firefox was supposed to compete with Chrome being bundled with nearly any download of any software anywhere, and with a one click installer on the Google homepage. T…

It's funny, because Firefox gained dominant market share in a time when Internet was much younger and Internet Explorer was bundled with Windows.

However Firefox offered something that IE did not have - extensions and customization, so those "in the know" popularized it. Especially abilty to block ads spread as word of mouth.

Then the "in the know" people would install Firefox and recommend it (for free!) to their family and friends.

Now we are in time when Google creates various "manifests" that are a fancy way of saying that they want to cut on ad-blocks in Chrome... so it would be Firefox time to shine again. What do they do? Their CEO (previous one) says that they dont want adblocks and could in fact get rid of them! So opposite of what made Firefox popular in the first place!

Then on top of that they developers of firefox have a big internal problem: they dont want to do what users want (ability to make addons, extensions and customize thing). They dont want to do that because it is "hard". They want to do greenfield projects that nobody is interested in. Note that those developers dont write Firefox for free, they earn good salaries. But management lets them do what they want.

The differentiator for Firefox were extensions - but those were killed, because the team did not want to support them

Business book will ask you "what is the unique proposition of Firefox" - it was adblock now and they want to kill even this.

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#165

Post by specialist »

PaulHoule wrote: post #153
specialist wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose of RRO assumes majoritarianism while ensuring the minority is heard. As you know, there are light weight versions, for boards and committees. But nothing I'd advocate for product development. > the most effective organizations As a fellow recovering activist, you might be interested in Vincent Bevins' If We Burn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_We_Burn Connected some dots for me. Things I experienced but…

I agree there is more than one way to look at it. There are good points to RRO but I think the legalism drives away a "silent majority" [1] of people who out of their background or temperament are particularly repelled by it. Over the long term I've seen the governance of organizations like my food co-op be quite complex and not what I thought when things were going on. For instance we had a conflict that boiled for…

Thanks for recommending Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. It's a good compliment to The Logic of Collective Action.

Sad I'm just now learning of it.

--

I've used Jacobin (and such) to reveal my blindspots. Criticisms, from the left, have helped me clarify, understand, and articulate my own positions and beliefs.

As for being apolitical, well... My primary motivator is to "increase the peace" (for brevity's sake). And partisanship hasn't helped much.

FWIW, you might enjoy David Roberts' recent interview with Samuel Bagg.

https://www.volts.wtf/p/the-cure-for-misinformation-is-not

They explain and articulate some of what I've experienced trying to (re)build relationships with friends and family (with opposing views). Micro dose validation of some stuff I've intuited (this decade past) was a nice dopamine hit.

Like you, I'm focusing my "political" and "activism" energy on building community, doing things. And trying to disengage from the never-ending partisan food fights.

Thanks again. Cheers.

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#166

Post by sq_ »

jg0r3 wrote: post #49
mapmeld wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this same mindset, and when I travel to somewhere less-traveled, I always like to post photos on iNaturalist and map parks and trails on OpenStreetMap to contribute to the open tech ecosystem. A year or so ago someone asked Reddit for examples of how iNaturalist is used by scientists. I go on Google Scholar and it's papers about crowdsourcing, community, classrooms. I didn't see papers where the data was part o…

I work in a large conservation organization focused on rare plant conservation. iNaturalist is sometimes used by our ecologists/biologists as a starting point for collating occurrence data. The iNaturalist data itself is likely specifically being pulled from gbif. Then they go private/specialty databases that have more spatially and taxonomically accurate records. But iNaturalist data is often not considered high qua…

> But iNaturalist data is often not considered high quality enough to be publishable by itself (wide brush statement) in my field of plant conservation.

As someone who recently started using iNaturalist, I've been curious about this. I think it's an awesome platform and really cool that people can share what they find, etc, but I noticed that people would pile on with species-level IDs on pictures that were obviously ambiguous between different species known to exist in the vicinity.

I of course want as much data as possible to be available to science, but it piqued my interest about whether a negative feedback loop of misidentifications to future identification models could form.

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