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Why I left iNaturalist

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Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#41

Post by Eji1700 »

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…

It bothers me that pragmatism and understanding things like business, economics, and the like can often be commingled with being greedy or evil.

Yes there are lots of people who use what they learn to justify shit positions but personally I started learning all these things because in any other endeavor you want to take seriously you learn everything you can about it.

The number of people who mean well but then just try to hope their way through stuff and relearn the same basic principles is sadly much too high.

Hell it doesn’t even have to revolve around moral/societal principles. The number of games I’ve seen that could’ve done better if they understood marketing, business, or even basic competitive balance better (even if so you can make your party game more fun) is huge.

But then again we’ve got this generation speed running “why finance laws and institutions exist” thanks to crypto. I guess the silver lining is people do learn a lot more once they’ve had personal experience with it.

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#42

Post by mapmeld »

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)…

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 of researching the plants and animals (knowing where to study, unexpected sightings, changes over time) like Budburst. Maybe biologists are doing that off the record and I'm 100% wrong, but it shook my perception that these are observations and I should upload yet another desert gecko sighting.

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#43

Post by mapmeld »

gbear605 wrote: post #36
geokon wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Wikim…

I am also frustrated with Wikidata. The one practical use I've seen is a lot of OpenStreetMap places' multilingual names are locked to Wikidata, which makes it harder for a troll to drop in and rename something, and may encourage maintaining and reusing the data.

But I tried to do some Wikidata queries for stuff like: what are all the neighborhoods and districts of Hong Kong, all the counties in Taiwan, and it's piecemeal coverage, tags different from one entity to another, not everything in a group is linked to OSM. It's not a lot of improvement over Wikipedia's Category pages.

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#44

Post by WoodenChair »

rPlayer6554 wrote: post #23
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…

Could you recommend any book in particular?

One that would've helped is "Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days" which is a collection of interviews with startup founders by Jessica Livingston. Even though this was a non-profit it effectively sounds like it was a tech startup (he was building an app that was based on, at the time (late 2000s), cutting edge machine learning technology). I think by hearing other founders' stories building other tech products, he would've learned about how they structured their organizations and led their teams. I liked the book personally, but the interviews will be hit or miss depending on the participant.

Here's the book on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3N47TG3

Here's a podcast summary of it: https://businessbooksandco.com/episode/1127af729a0d4aec/foun...

But frankly even just a basic textbook or video course on leadership/management would've helped or something like High Output Management by Andy Grove (Amazon https://amzn.to/3NCAZME, podcast summary https://businessbooksandco.com/episode/095f226633d34496/high...).

In terms of dealing with all of the personal conflict between team members, Radical Candor may have helped (Amazon https://amzn.to/4qNa7bf, podcast summary https://businessbooksandco.com/episode/938d044a/radical-cand...).

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#45

Post by patcon »

WoodenChair wrote: post #40
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…

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 machin…

thanks for reading my message in good faith :)

as someone who co-founded a non-hierarchical community[1] (that's still going strong after a decade of weekly events), co-founded a worker cooperative[2], and experimented with sociocracy (and ALSO fully admit I failed out of it for reasons of misalignment!) -- i just think we owe it to ourselves to not discount that certain things XY can't be built under system Z. There are many ways possible where leaders don't always direct, or maybe only direct in short spurts. This all-or-nothing, lead-from-the-front, only-way-through-is-up perspective of getting things done (and working together), it's not the only way possible :) (respectfully!)

[1]: https://civictech.ca/

[2]: https://hypha.coop/

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#46

Post by mapmeld »

lovich wrote: post #30
n8agrin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sociocracy is a theory of governance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocracy

I’m mildly familiar with the idea, but I was referencing this subset of the quoted sentence > … and, like many democracies before us, we ultimately voted to abolish our own democracy … The ellipses are intentional, if the fragments of the sentence before or after change how to interpret this, please let me know

The US example that I would give would be the Articles of Confederation being turned over and replaced with our Constitution.

In the article I read this to mean: they designed a power structure thinking it should be fully open and flat, like a company where everyone can do everything on GitHub. But once they had run the project for some time, they acknowledged that the decisions were flowing through the three people.

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#47

Post by n8agrin »

WoodenChair wrote: post #40
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…

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 machin…

With full respect to your right to criticize, I don't understand what differentiates an organization trying to build a social networking app around biodiversity data from an organization feeding the poor, and those organizations' ability to experiment with their governance system. Can you expand that thought or is it rhetorical?

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#48

Post by WoodenChair »

patcon wrote: post #45
WoodenChair wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 machin…

thanks for reading my message in good faith :) as someone who co-founded a non-hierarchical community[1] (that's still going strong after a decade of weekly events), co-founded a worker cooperative[2], and experimented with sociocracy (and ALSO fully admit I failed out of it for reasons of misalignment!) -- i just think we owe it to ourselves to not discount that certain things XY can't be built under system Z. There…

Looks like cool stuff, cheers. Always interesting to learn about new ways of organizing. The great thing is if the world is free enough we can all experiment with different structures if others will agree to experiment with us. But these do sound like they fall into the social side of the dichotomy of social focused versus product focused that I mentioned. The author of the post was trying to be in both at the same time which I think is hard to do.

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#49

Post by jg0r3 »

mapmeld wrote: post #42
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)…

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 quality enough to be publishable by itself (wide brush statement) in my field of plant conservation.

We've tried to have some conversations with iNaturalist and they weren't really interest in talking, gave me pause on what their motives as an organization are.

But conservation tools are few and far between, and iNaturalist is a really powerful tool for initial data exploration.

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#50

Post by WoodenChair »

n8agrin wrote: post #47
WoodenChair wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 machin…

With full respect to your right to criticize, I don't understand what differentiates an organization trying to build a social networking app around biodiversity data from an organization feeding the poor, and those organizations' ability to experiment with their governance system. Can you expand that thought or is it rhetorical?

I mean I think there's a pretty stark difference between a charity feeding the poor and an app startup (even a non-profit one). So stark that it feels almost weird writing this comment, but I'll take your question at face value. Okay, here's a few:

- Decisions at a charity feeding the poor are likely less controversial and binary in nature than decisions for a product focused app organization. If people are making a lot of decisions bottom-up at the charity, as long as more people are getting fed, it's probably fine as long as it's not chaos. In a product-focused organization you need to make binary decisions: will we use this app icon design or that one? Will we have one app for professionals and one for laypeople or a unified app? Will we use SVM or a neural network? Somebody ultimately has to be the decider on these binary decisions. They cannot all be bottom-up decisions if you want to have a cohesive vision for the product.

- If you're feeding the poor you're probably a charity or a government. People who work for a charity or a government are more likely to be motivated by the common good. So they don't need as much extrinsic motivation from leadership. An app startup, even a non-profit one (which I guess can be technically a charity), is going to have workers who are also motivated by money (yes even if it's a non-profit, they have other high paying options), technical decisions, and sure the mission too. I have a couple friends who have hopped around between non-profit software organizations due to these non-mission reasons. Corralling those motivations often requires a different management mindset than working with people who are just happy to be there.

- If you're feeding the poor you're probably a charity or a government and you therefore probably need to answer to your donors or voters. You need full transparency. This was an app startup, albeit a non-profit one. It doesn't really answer to anyone except who it gets grants from and even then is not fully transparent/open (has a proprietary machine learning model).

These are just a few but do you really think any governance structure can just be applied to any organization? They're not all compatible.

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