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Why I left iNaturalist

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Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#31

Post by anotherpaul »

contingencies wrote: post #5

If you don’t like the way your data is used to train AI models, you can’t currently move your data to a non-AI service while still contributing to and using iNat data, even if such a service existed. But you should be able to do that. 100x yes! I was disgusted to learn that while the very non-profit status iNaturalist enjoys demands that they share their output, the organization thinks keeping its models secret is le…

100% agree, I am still shocked that the models are not open sourced. It's the data from the community and I feel it goes very much against the spirit of the community to keep the machine learning part, which is very central to the app, so secret.

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#32

Post by calvinmorrison »

culi wrote: post #17

> Toward the end of our time at CAS we experimented with sociocracy as a way to organize without hierarchy and coercion, but despite my enthusiasm for the form, we didn’t start with universal buy-in or understanding from the whole team, we didn’t fully adopt its structures, and, like many democracies before us, we ultimately voted to abolish our own democracy when we formed the “leadership circle” and created a hiera…

I always thought the relgious Agile was kind of kooky when it met the real world, but I really think kanban / theory of constraints is very good and real for the business world.

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#33

Post by nevdka »

culi wrote: post #17

> Toward the end of our time at CAS we experimented with sociocracy as a way to organize without hierarchy and coercion, but despite my enthusiasm for the form, we didn’t start with universal buy-in or understanding from the whole team, we didn’t fully adopt its structures, and, like many democracies before us, we ultimately voted to abolish our own democracy when we formed the “leadership circle” and created a hiera…

People will often write about something that worked for them, and from that pull out abstractions they believe are generalised and universal. They rarely are.

Organisational patterns that work for startups rapidly iterating to find product market fit won’t work well for a consultancy building a better defined product for a single client, or a corpo IT department trying to shoehorn a new distribution channel through a 30 year old logistics system.

A team of experienced engineers who know the problem domain and have worked together for years needs different organisational structures than a team of new hires and grads. A team of introverted hermits and a team of extroverts will function differently regardless of organisational structure.

You need to have some idea of where ideas work and don’t work before you can design the ones needed for your specific situation.

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#34

Post by nemo »

tptacek wrote: post #6
teruakohatu wrote: post #3

iNaturalist ranks right up there with Wikipedia in importance. It is more than one organisation, but rather a central org + a network of regional organisations. The regional organisation provides a lot of biological technical expertise. Citizen scientists alone would not be able to correctly handle the complex taxonomic issues you have in biology… or even basic identification in many cases. Where the organisation(s)…

Having never used iNaturalist, but as someone who believes that Wikipedia might be one of the most important knowledge resources created in the last 100 years, I'd love to hear more about why you think this.

Between iNaturalist and Wikipedia, for me iNaturalist is the more significant of the two. I use iNat every day, have many tens of thousands of observations, and using it I've learned to identify thousands of birds, plants, bugs, fungi, and other things out there. Now I can name trees, plants, birds, et al, but more than that I understand better how they fit together into ecosystems. Also I've learned a lot of taxonomy which actually helps inform my view of the world a lot. In the process I've connected a lot more to nature, and thanks to iNat (and eBird) I now spent a lot more time doing meaningful things exploring wild spaces and spend less time scrolling on web pages. Wikipedia's invaluable as well, and completely indispensable, but between the two it's been less significant for me actually directly learning about the natural world I live in.

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#35

Post by patcon »

WoodenChair wrote: post #18

Business books sometimes get a bad rap on here, but I never read an essay where I more thought "wow this guy really needs to read some basic business books." Even though it was a non-profit, there is so much wisdom in them about management and leadership that was clearly lacking throughout his experience. It's too late now. But maybe if he understood some of the reasons back when they were starting the app why organi…

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 misguided their intentions are? Seems a little ~~off~~ unfair to me

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#36

Post by gbear605 »

geokon wrote: post #12
teruakohatu wrote: post #3

iNaturalist ranks right up there with Wikipedia in importance. It is more than one organisation, but rather a central org + a network of regional organisations. The regional organisation provides a lot of biological technical expertise. Citizen scientists alone would not be able to correctly handle the complex taxonomic issues you have in biology… or even basic identification in many cases. Where the organisation(s)…

It's interesting to contrast with Wikipedia. I'm not deeply involved with either, so I'm talking out of my ass and would be curious to hear other people's thoughts here. But Wikipedia has gone to great lengths to make the data side, Wikidata, and the app/website, decoupled. I'm guessing iNaturalist hasn't? The OpenStreetMaps model is also interesting. Where they basically only provide the data and expect others to ma…

I’m not convinced that that’s an accurate view of Wikidata. Wikidata is a basically disconnected project. There is some connection, but it’s really very minimal and only for a small subset of Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia is 99% just text articles, not data combined together.

Frankly, I think the reason people haven’t built apps on top of Wikidata is that the data there isn’t very useful.

I say this not to diss Wikimedia, as the Wikipedia project itself is great and an amazing tool and resource. But Wikidata is simply not there.

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#37

Post by tensor »

contingencies wrote: post #5

If you don’t like the way your data is used to train AI models, you can’t currently move your data to a non-AI service while still contributing to and using iNat data, even if such a service existed. But you should be able to do that. 100x yes! I was disgusted to learn that while the very non-profit status iNaturalist enjoys demands that they share their output, the organization thinks keeping its models secret is le…

Asking for their models to be open and banning AI are two different things. AI is used throughout the scientific world and banning it would be immensely damaging. Putting aside consumer use cases, being able to do large scale analysis or search via machine learning is incredibly important to various fields of science.

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#38

Post by tensor »

chmod775 wrote: post #29
lovich wrote: post #21

> Toward the end of our time at CAS we experimented with sociocracy as a way to organize without hierarchy and coercion, but despite my enthusiasm for the form, we didn’t start with universal buy-in or understanding from the whole team, we didn’t fully adopt its structures, and, like many democracies before us, we ultimately voted to abolish our own democracy when we formed the “leadership circle” and created a hiera…

> Is he referencing a bunch of democracies I haven’t heard of [..] Historically: Weimar Republic, Czechoslovakia in 1948, Italy starting 1922, Austria starting 1933. More recently: Venezuela starting 1999 Halfway there: Turkey starting 2017, Hungary starting 2010 If you broaden past just nations to include various organizations that used to be democractically organized at one point, you could make a much longer list.…

Also halfway there: US starting 2024/25

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#39

Post by DwnVoteHoneyPot »

WoodenChair wrote: post #18

Business books sometimes get a bad rap on here, but I never read an essay where I more thought "wow this guy really needs to read some basic business books." Even though it was a non-profit, there is so much wisdom in them about management and leadership that was clearly lacking throughout his experience. It's too late now. But maybe if he understood some of the reasons back when they were starting the app why organi…

He has opinions on how the company should be managed, what the product should be, and how to interact with the community... but he abdicated all the responsibility, didn't provide leadership, and is now complaining it didn't turn out how he wanted it. This is personality problem and business books won't help.

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#40

Post by WoodenChair »

patcon wrote: post #35
WoodenChair wrote: post #18

Business books sometimes get a bad rap on here, but I never read an essay where I more thought "wow this guy really needs to read some basic business books." Even though it was a non-profit, there is so much wisdom in them about management and leadership that was clearly lacking throughout his experience. It's too late now. But maybe if he understood some of the reasons back when they were starting the app why organi…

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…

First, I'll just say I think the iNaturalist app is great and I've used it before and enjoyed it.

I assume he had good intentions when experimenting with non-hierarchical governance, but this wasn't the right organization with which to experiment with them. If it was feeding the poor, maybe "sociocracy" makes sense. But its main goal was to make an app (and although it's a non-profit it maintains a proprietary machine learning model mind you, this isn't Wikipedia).

And when you make an app you need direction. You can't be going in 5 different major directions based on individual contributors' whims. And beyond even just the structural issues, he also needed basic leadership/management skills to direct the product which he didn't provide. "Scott and I were titular “co-directors” but we did not provide a lot of direction and most of the big moves and features were driven largely by individual initiative."

So he was a director who didn't direct. Then later on when he chose to step down from being a leader, he decided he wanted to direct again. Isn't that ironic?

As far as can we criticize? Of course we can. If someone's going to write a public essay calling out other people by name and criticizing them we can criticize their essay and what they wrote about their experience.

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