Your thoughts on how the iNat team can best help the community grow and thrive

[car...@inaturalist.org]

Hi iNaturalist community members,

This is Carrie Seltzer from my new email address—this week I joined the iNaturalist staff! I am thrilled to help this community continue to grow and connect more people to nature while enhancing our collective understanding of biodiversity.

Next week there will be an iNat staff retreat to plan future iNaturalist development. In preparation for that, I would love to hear your thoughts about how the core team can best support you in your efforts to grow participation in your area (be it geographic, taxonomic, or otherwise).

I would appreciate if we keep the focus of this thread on the generation of ideas, without extensively repeating discussion of previous feature requests or changes, and without criticizing other people’s ideas.

Other ways to think about this prompt:

-How can we help you be a better, more effective multiplier of iNat activity?

-What can we do keep new, returning, or occasional users engaged?

Comments by the end of the day on Monday will be most helpful.

Thanks for all that you do to make iNaturalist an awesome, productive, and welcoming community.

Best,

Carrie Seltzer

[Russell P]

Maybe send out an automated, one-time message to relatively new users that seem to have stopped posting with a message along the lines of "We miss seeing you on iNaturalist. If you'd like to see some tips and tricks for using iNaturalist, visit this page". And link to a page that shows cool ways that one can be more engaged in the iNaturalist community, perhaps with some quotes from a variety of users (along with pics of their faces) with personal stories of why they like or use iNaturalist. 

[bobby23]

Hi, Russell.

I'm afraid that might be seen as intrusive and dissuade people from using the app (or at least I would... that's why I rarely use Facebook or any other app anymore). Some people legitimately just do not go outside to view nature as often as they want/could/should - people get busy, and that doesn't have anything to do with whether they like iNaturalist or not. I agree that one-timers could be encouraged to comeback, but I'm not sure notifications are a good way to go about it.

I think iNaturalist could be more interactive and fun outside of the realms of IDing observations. Someone the other day suggested including quizzes to hone one's IDing skills. I thought that was a great idea, but I think it can be more expansive than that. You can location-based quizzes, for example. "Which of the following members of Big Cats (Genus Panthera) cannot be found in Kenya? Lion, Leopard, or Tiger"? Even if quizzes aren't the way to go, something more interactive on iNat would be a valuable asset to keep interest, I think.

Just my two cents.

- Bobby

[Charlie Hohn]

Congrats again, Carrie! I will toss out a few ideas that I hope aren't the same as the ones I always rail on about, and that are positive and customized towards growing the community. These are some of my favorites right now and while they are indeed 'feature requests' I tried to think of things that a wider range of people would like and would thus expand and strengthen the community.

-Abundant, easy bioblitz functionality. we already have this but it could be even better. Lists of nearby bioblitzes that are prominent and easy to find; pretty maps; maybe a list of all bioblitzes someone has participated in, in their profile. Make it separate from projects entirely. I think bioblitzes are one of the main ways people find the site. 

-some sort of expanded and more formalized user experience for students who are assigned to use iNat. I know I often gripe about bad data generated by some of these students, but there are also a few from each class who stick around and turn into some of our best users. I think a little bit of in-site functionality for teachers to help them curate, and for students to highlight that they are here to learn and gentle guidance as to how to use the site. When the class is over (as set by the teacher), have an official 'graduation' where the student's account turns into a 'regular' account.

-Consider allowing 'secret' observations. I know this is antithetical to the site in some ways... but I know a lot of conservation groups won't use the site because they can't or don't want to share things. For instance, tracking rare plant specifically or going on private land. Sometimes obscuring works but sometimes it just creates confusion with the obscured scattered dots. In my mind a 'secret' observation would still add to life list and would still show up on a users' personal map. However it would not show up on the timeline or other people's maps. Because the users doing this are not contributing to the community directly i think it would be OK to charge a fee of a few dollars a month for the added functionality.  Don't make it ridiculous like ArcMap or NatureServe biotics, just a little bit to make sure it isn't used lightly.  Why do this? I hink if we got more conservation 'professionals' using the site that way they will also end up interfacing with the community and adding plenty of 'non secret' observations and IDs too. We don't want the site to turn into a pedantic academic place where amateurs feel unwelcome, but getting more specialists using the site will add value for everyone, I think.

-Consider a few other things for the same reasons; expanded app and website functionality for plant plots, releves, amphibian bucket traps, bird mist net sites, etc. It could be a 'pro' app that again costs a small amount of money. Focus the app on rapid, sleek data collection without the features that don't add to it. I could go on and on about this if you would like more info, but if you actually want to do it at some point you should check with some non-botanists too to make sure it is widely usable.

-Automatically run the algorithm on all the uploaded photos and attach it to each observation as a filterable field but not one that adds to community ID. This would be fun and high tech and allow for error correcting and also show us where the algorithm is getting confused. I know some of us roll our eyes at the algorithm data, and it does need more work, but it's really neat and people really like it. Integrating it more would excite and engage new users I think. Relatedly, allow a data quality button for 'exclude observation from training for algorithm'. There are some photos that are blurry, or weird, or otherwise not useful for the algorithm and probably make it worse. 

-Allow tagging within photos. For instance, if you have one photo but two observations, because the photo has a bird in a tree and you want to add both.  Make it so you can click on and frame the bird (this would also help with the cropping issues some have, you could display the zoomed in frame next to the overview photo). Same for the tree in that observation. Heck maybe even let you see the one photo with all its tags and let other users tag things in your photo if they see them (users could remove them or turn them off).  So Iupload a birch tree and someone sees a maple in the background, let them tag that too and fork off a new observation. Why not? This last part may be too weird or radical for some but I think it would be neat.

-Make the website and app more suitable for 'roving naturalist groups'. The biggest thing is to make it so two or three people can be tagged to the same observation. Ebird allows this now. For instance, I go on a hike with Erika Mitchell and Kent Mcfarland, Kent focuses on birds, Erika on mosses, and me on trees (or whatever) and we all tag each other so we get all the species on ur timeline without having to each add the same one. It would be great for classes too. Take the whole class out and see how many species you can find as a group. It would be lots of fun and i think engage people. One related thing I'd love to see is to bring back the map from the old school app where anything youv'e observed that day stays on the map even if you are out of cell service. That way you can tell where you have been and already looked at stuff. I miss that feature! 

-Make it easier to attach observations to journal posts and maybe combine them with the roving naturalist thing. Let people create a spontaneous bioblitz, roam around, then make some notes about what they saw. 'Automated Field Notebook'. Allow people to take geolocated notes in the field and then create event maps from a day of naturalizing. 

-Improve generation of neat maps for popular places - both accentuating where neat stuff was seen by others and encouraging people to safely explore new areas. The places for mid-sized parks for instance could have more map functionality mixed in with field notes and map notes and such. A popular trail could generate a list of neat recent sightings, when a plant was blooming in the last few years, people could add natural community mapping notes, things like that. 

-CONSIDER - ok i know some will not like this -  CONSIDER allowing some temporally transient non-living things to be added to iNat. For instance, recording flow or erosion in an ephemeral stream... an unusual geologic feature... an interesting weather event... etc. I know this one may be a stretch, but something to think about.

-have more meetups and events... i have not been to as many as i would like due to being busy with a toddler etc, but i really appreciate those sorts of things.

-Maybe create a somewhat more formal process for discussions and debates on here. I have myself become frustrated because after a heated debate my 'side' was discarded without me knowing why, and probably just as often it happened to someone else too. i am not asking for the group to be a democracy, but i don't think non-binding voting or a message from the devs about why something was chosen is a bad thing. A couple of times a 'compromise' was supposed to happen and didn't, and people remember that stuff. for my part, i should spend more time welcoming and helping new users and offering positive ideas rather than bickering on here or rehashing the same debates. Maybe a slightly more formal process would help with the latter. 

OK that is all I've got for now, hopefully not too off topic, but feel free to ask if you would like any clarity, and i will try to refrain from arguing about ideas i don't like that appear here :)

C

On Wednesday, February 28, 2018 at 8:45:43 PM UTC-5, Russell P wrote:

[Charlie Hohn]

oh, one other thing, can you create a journal or post on iNat itself with this same topic? I think a lot of people on there don't read the google groups.

[bouteloua]

A community forum that is hosted on iNaturalist.

An email newsletter that summarizes new iNat features, snippets of findings/research, links to the iNat blog posts.

More active curation of taxonomic issues and bad data so that it can be seen as a more reliable resource.

Refine the observation field/annotation concept further to reduce duplicate fields, making the data more useful to everyone, including potential external citizen science efforts/potential partners.

cassi

[jesse rorabaugh]

It sure seems like bioblitz events can be improved by making them easier to advertise. Maybe a way to easily announce them and subscribe to an area to be notified of any events which happen in that area? Maybe automatically notify people who have posted observations within fifty miles in the month preceding the bioblitz?

Security on data for sensitive organisms still seems lacking. As the site grows this will grow more and more important.

The user interface on journal posts really needs some improvement. A way to easily post photos from any observation and a better way to link to observations would be a good start.

[Charlie Hohn]

a few other things, 

if the retreat is the sort where you re able to share ideas without causing problems or making it less productive, it would be neat to see a blog post about what you all are thinking of .  Exciting!

Also.... you say we want to grow the site... I agree that we should get more people on iNat because it's great and that also means more data! But I don't think growth just for the sake of growth is a good idea. i think you/we should think about exactly how to grow it and the end goal should be making a better community, which is facilitated by more diversity and more people. It shouldn't be growing just to grow imho. The site has already grown amazingly, which brings lots of good but also some bad. I'd personally prefer a steady state excellent site over one that keeps growing faster than it can support and doesn't know what it is. And that hasn't happened with iNat but it certainly can with things like this.

[Chris Cheatle]

My five cents worth (we dont have pennies anymore so I can't give two cents). A few have already been mentioned, but are things I would have included had I replied first:

• shared observations (multiple listed observers on the same record) - I do agree this should be a priority. Not just in terms of better measuring abundance and frequency. I work with several folks around the province who use the iNat data and love it. The kind of folks who belong to specialist societies and publish annual sighting report etc. They love the growth of data, ease of getting etc but universally I have heard they are frustrated by the time they need to invest to find and eliminate duplicate records. And more frustrating there are too many hacks used right now (record names in a comment, some record in the description, there are multiple observation fields for it etc)
• increased security - the truly private or as Charlie calls it secret observation. I have read lots of content on here about why "experts" will not use the site. Only 2 have ever struck me as viable, and among the folks I have talked to this is the only one ever raised to me. One of the 2 can't be fixed - that an hyper-focused expert does not want to participate on a "all taxa" site. The other is that it is too easy and there are too many loopholes that allow the locations of sensitive sightings to be figured out.
• Annotations / Observation Fields - as raised, really figure out the plan for these. Right now the bloat in observation fields makes them almost unusable beyond a single individual. Any kind of systemic data analysis or collection is really difficult because the same data can be represented in so many different places and fields etc. There really should not be 20 different ways to record the number of individuals seen etc. Included here should be a consolidation or "debloat" plan.
  
• Furthering translations - Give some priority to really thinking how multi-lingual iNat wants to be. Determine a translation plan not just for the UI, but how running a multi-lingual site deals with data collection. For example one of the reasons for the existing bloat in Observation Fields and Places for example is the same thing entered in multiple languages - you have the English count fields, and then the French ones, and the Spanish ones and the Italian ones etc. Can a similar approach to species names be introduced for Places and Observation Fields were translations of standard single data values are presented to users
• Focus on speeding entry on the website version - The app is a great tool, but not everyone wants to use their phone or whip it out every 30 seconds when hiking etc. Among the people I have introduced to the site, their #1 complaint is the time it takes to enter their observations via the web client. Are there ways to make more efficient ? Solutions like saved locations, "checklist style entry" (tell the system I was in Florida and want to record some birds - give me a list of options and let me check off the ones I saw - auto create the records and let me fill in the details afterwards), and I am sure many other good ideas. Recognize that a lot of folks on the site are not IT pros, solutions currently offered like carrying a GPS, then geo-tagging your photos etc are not viable for many
  
• classifying photos - maybe not the best term, but some way to mark photos as for example not appropriate for the algorithm, or maybe even not displayed as a reference photo. For example, mark a photo of a pile of pellets from a White-tailed Deer as such. I have no issue with it as documentation of a sighting, but should that be in the taxa page list of photos ?
• greater acceptance of non species level Research Grade attainment - there seems to be a real concern about genus or other non-species level data getting research grade level. Sometimes the reality is this is as good as it gets. For example, if a certain number of people all agree that genus is as good as possible for an ID, automatically move it over to RG. If 4 people agree that this Meadowhawk is clearly in Symptrum, then move it over, why leave it hanging in the Identify Pool (i Know the It cant be improved is there in the DQ, but it seems people are really leery of making that decision or are unaware of it)
• tool between Identify and Observation Search - a lot of people here focus on the need to get additional ID's beyond the 2 for research grade. But it is not easy to do, as has been mentioned, get a tool that has the same functionality as the Identity page, but can find records already in RG, for example show me all birds in Canada with only 3 ID's etc. I think more people would help review and add "confirming" ID's were it as easy as on the Identity page

I am sure more might come to mind, but I will leave it there for now.

[Ian Toal]

I was going to suggest something about increasing ID skills for new users as well. I was going to suggest some sort of identification basics link, along with links to more information. That's quite didactic, and not very interactive, though. Quizzes sound fun, and people do learn best when they are doing as opposed to just reading. It's not really my area of expertise, but perhaps involving some educators in the process (if it's not already done) would generate more ideas. 

Ian

[Jane Widness]

Lots of great ideas so far!

Like Chris, I would also like to see a consistent way to get photos marked as not the typical view of the animal -- scat, prints, bones, etc.  I sometimes try to review really old observations stuck in Needs ID, but a huge portion are spoor and it's usually not worth my time to look for the true mystery mammals.  We might even be able to attract more spoor experts if they could easily filter on that.

[Charlie Hohn]

Yeah I really think some version of the 'animal sight or song' field (or one of its many duplicates) should become an Annotation. And thus echoing what others say, we need more Annotations and less duplicate fields.

[Tom Norton]

Congratulations, Carrie!  I am delighted to know that you have joined the staff, and that you will be helping the iNaturalist organization to move forward in positive directions.  I am already very happy with most aspects of using iNaturalist, but here are a few suggestions that I hope the team will consider for the future:

• Please always keep the technology and platform capacity moving forward as fast or faster than the growth in site usage.  I already see a big difference in site response time, depending on the time of day.  During busy hours, things often slow to a crawl, making it take longer to process each identification or update, whereas during early morning hours, the site is much quicker.  Please focus on streamlining user interactions, and on upgrading capacity as needed, so that the user experience always remains positive.  (Just as one example, perhaps consider changing the process by which an observation updates itself.  If I disagree with an ID, such that the community ID reverts to a high level, such as dicots, the map may then take a long time to refresh because there are so many observations of dicots in the area.  Could this process be simplified and streamlined, for example by not plotting every single dicot observation, to save time?)
  
• Similarly, whenever you consider adding features to the phone app, or more bells and whistles on the website, please make sure first and foremost that the speed and ease of use remain excellent.
• As Charlie and others have suggested, please make it very, very easy for teachers to find the useful guides (that already exist) for using iNaturalist productively in a classroom setting, and consider changes to student-level accounts, so as to help reduce the big influxes of erroneous data that we see every spring and fall.
  

Best,
Tom

[Jason_M]

One thing that I personally would like is an extra ID screen that can search for research grade observations that are iffy on their IDs. It only takes 2 IDs for an observation to be incorrectly given research grade. Maybe a way to find observations that only have 2 or 3 IDs?

[Susan Hewitt]

How nice to have Carrie on the team! She will be a real asset. We are happy to welcome you Carrie.

I honestly think that iNaturalist is doing great already. I don't think we need the user numbers to grow any faster, as it seems to me we are already attracting record numbers of new users.

I do think that is important when we are trying to recruit new users to explain to them that they do not have to know what something is in order to make an observation of it. It is fine just to call it "plant" or "insect" if you don't know any more than that. Or even "Life" if you have no idea.

The AI is already a wonderful feature and it will improve as more data is fed to it. Right now it tends to lump too many worldwide species under IDs that are in fact US species, especially West Coast species, because that is what it knows best.

I will think carefully to see if I can come up with anything that would make my participation easier. I would actually like to know more about how to tackle high-level taxon revisions.

best to all,

Susan

On Wednesday, February 28, 2018 at 5:45:48 PM UTC-5, car...@inaturalist.org wrote:

[Carrie Seltzer]

Hi everyone,

Thank you for your thoughts so far. I just added a journal post with this same question to get a different audience outside of this group (no need to chime in twice, just FYI since it was suggested).

I agree with the sentiments that growth for the sake of growth is not desirable, and that growth that is too rapid can be disruptive to the community. In that vein, in what ways do you want iNaturalist to grow (or not)? What kinds of participation is most important to you in your use of iNaturalist? From the community-building perspective, what else do you want to do that you can't do right now?

I am especially interested to hear from people outside the United States, and from people who are infrequent contributors to the Google Group dialogue. Thanks again!

Best,

Carrie

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Carrie Seltzer

Stakeholder Engagement Strategist

iNaturalist

California Academy of Sciences

[Colin Purrington]

I posted this on blog location already but will paste here in case useful for discussion:

---- 

I love seeing the featured observations on twitter and instagram ... could you do some challenges? For example, ask on twitter whether anyone has good photographs of a particular species (rare, endangered, newly discovered, or just cool) that is in the news. iNaturalist often is excited to share the "first X" observation, so these challenges could also be for filling in gaps that somehow still exist but shouldn't (each curator probably has a most-wanted list, I'd bet, if pressed). I suspect a lot iNaturalist users have large digital libraries but are too lazy (like me) to post *everything* they have ... but would be totally happy to post a specific pic if asked. But because it's on twitter, non-users might see the post and think, "hmm. I have that pic, perhaps I can join and post." So it would be a way to engage with current users and perhaps entice more biologists to join up. I'd also like to see more projects featured, such as tracking spread of an invasive or compiling pics of morphs for a given species.

[Star Donovan]

Does iNat have any sort of outreach or PR department? 

I've been reaching out to local environmental groups this week to see if they had any upcoming events (guided hikes, etc) planned to coincide with the upcoming city nature challenge and so far all of them (evenTPWD, which has several projects and users in iNat) seemed unaware of it.

[Tony Iwane]

Hey Colin, this is Tony, I manage iNat's social media. Definitely a good idea, I'll try implementing it and see how it goes. Happy to field taxa suggestions from people at tiw...@inaturalist.org

Tony

[evanm...@gmail.com]

Hi Carrie and all,
Congratulations, Carrie! Of course you realize that this platform is ridiculously fun, so it should be easy to promote. Contributing to science just by being curious is probably the best protocol for new naturalists ever.  My favorite thing is that the Place tool is this beautiful, interactive encyclopedia for any scruffy location (like some schools, good urban biology stuff). It seems like iNaturalist is the only citizen science platform that gives back in this incredibly Place specific (like building a Wayback Machine for the future!  NPS I&M comment by Tom Philippi years ago...) and community oriented way. It's just great.

& Since you asked about improving things.....
Having just secured a small Save the Redwoods League education grant (Jumpstarting citizen science via iNaturalist in Humboldt County schools...), I would actually like two specific things to enhance our regional iNaturalist community, perhaps by next Spring 2019:
*A bioblitz design option to add a Place column (next to no. obs./ no. species/ and most observed species columns) so that if I arrange a non-contiguous, multi-Place bioblitz, one school can beat them all. Then an entire school could "win" for the "most" of something (e.g., no. obs; no.research grade obs; no. species; most natives; most non-natives; most artsy photo composition, etc. etc....whatever participating schools prefer). This would be super fun and motivating, and better than manually keeping track of which observers are at which Place polygon.

*An iNaturalist ambassador like tiwane (or more, sent for free, because my grant is too tiny to pay for it this time around) from the CA Academy of Sciences to meet all the partners in person, and to be able to join us for a culminating Blacklight Bioblitz (or better ideas?). The partners includes about 15 schools so far (by teacher request!), including two HSU profs., and the Sequoia Park Zoo, the Humboldt County Office of Ed., CA Naturalists coordinators from College of the Redwoods and Friends of the Dunes, and CCC/WSP.. An added guest lecture by this iNat ambassador  (likely a Sequoia Park Zoo venue) would also be nice, perhaps about history of creation of the platform, examples of creative ideas for using the presence data and enhancing it with bioblitzes and projects, favorite observations in the field, etc.

I have a lot of other ideas, and will probably have many more as I get the school and zoo community going on this.

Thanks for your consideration!

Liz
(aka evanmant)

[David K]

Congratulations on the new role Carrie, this seems like a natural fit.

My focus is on programming changes that make iNat easier to use-

-     I support Charlie’s suggestion re allowing people to upload a single photo once, and use it for multiple observations (eg, a bee, the flower it’s getting nectar from, and a tree in the background).  I’m indifferent about the solution (i.e. tags or something else), but the result is very desirable.  It is a time-saver that users should find appealing.

 

Some solution to the group outing issue would also be a big win.  Many people go out in groups and it is inefficient to require each member to enter a separate observation for the same thing.  Also, consider of it from a data user’s perspective, you get somewhat degraded data that needs some filtering to be useful – eg. if 6 people in a group all report a Bald Eagle, were there really 6 eagles or 1 eagle reported 6 times?  Think of a way to have a single entry for the eagle, allowing multiple people to include it in their observation list, and possibly allowing multiple observers to add photos to the single entry. 

 

Several people have mentioned the annotation/field overlap/proliferation problem.  Oddly, the unlimited choices in the field menu sometimes overwhelm people - e.g., not everyone wants to figure out which of the dozens of fields that include the word 'count' are correct, and few people want to spend time on something like this (and the search results seem random to me). The anyone-can-do-anything philosophy seems out of place, especially when there are organizations and individuals trying to collect and use data in a standardized format.

 

I think the most common complaint from new users is the lack of a saved location function.  I see why it’s not that relevant for the phone crowd.  But I sometimes think that the balance of development effort is tilted away from computer users, which is odd, because that’s where massive digital libraries tend to reside.  Think about how your users could add observations faster and help them to do it.

-       I manage two successful projects here, but helping new users adapt to the site, and directing them to our organization’s preferred fields, asking them to join projects and share location data is a big use of my volunteer time that I am increasingly reluctant to supply as iNat grows.  I don't mind the role of project admin (posting journal notes, helping with IDs, welcoming people) but I feel that I am providing too much support that wouldn't be required if iNat had better documentation.  And part of this may be that there are no advanced tips on how to do things like use fields and annotations (or why they are important).  I know this has been raised before, but I believe that different generations need different support to successfully get going.  A friend told me about a bioblitz that she participated in last summer and what struck her was the generational divide between the younger people (phones, many with the iNat app) and the older crowd who tended to use cameras if they were documenting things.  Pleas think specifically about ways to connect with those closer to retirement than graduation.

David

[stanw...@gmail.com]

That is wonderful news.  Your comments on so many features of iNaturalist in response to others have been very helpful.  The single most important resource I could have is a list of functions one would want to do (e.g. follow someone, find comments on something, . . .) and a simple description of how to do it.  I have found I waste a lot of time trying to figure out how to do things.  But I think the site is great.  Easy to use.  Easy to get started on.  But it is the next level of use that eludes me, sometimes.

Thank you.

stan

[Sam Kieschnick]

This is such spectacular news -- soooo happy for Carrie and for iNat!

1.  Bridging the gap between the users of the app and the users of the website is crucially important.  I find that many of those that solely use the app don't get all of the benefits and joys of the iNaturalist community.  I'm not sure how this could be done though.  I try to post in comments to users of the app to go to the website (or non-mobile version of iNat), but it's fairly hit-or-miss.  I've found that when a user shifts from just the app to both the app and website (or just website), they become far more active community members.  I wonder if something as simple as "click here to view this observation on the website!" on an observation made from the app would partially bridge the gap...  

2.  Overall, the infrastructure has to sustain the growth -- I've noticed some slower load times and slower ID's during some times.  It may be a side effect of the growth that we just need to be a bit more patient for things to load.  Ideally, as the website and user/data base grows, I'd hope that the speeds wouldn't decrease...but that may be too idealistic!

3.  I think a "bioblitz locator" would be an awesome function!  There are some calendars and journal entries that have lists of bioblitzes, but I do think it'd be worthy to have a front page "find a bioblitz near you!" feature -- participants could load up bioblitzes and tie them to places, and users could find a place to join a bioblitz (again, this would likely be a website function rather than an app function -- so bridging that gap would be necessary before only app users may see it).  Bioblitzes are such fun -- and they truly develop communities.  I've experienced this on many occasions, and I loooooove it.  

4.  This google group has a lot of really vocal curators and wonderful suggestions, but it can also be a hot mess.  ;)  It'd be cool to have a little more organization to this google group, although I honestly don't know what that would look like.  I lurk a bunch in here, but I rarely post because I don't want to make it messier!  Again, no idea what this would look like, but I would hope it'd be something to relieve a few headaches.

Looking forward to hearing some feedback from the iNat staff retreat!  

~Sam

[Erica Krimmel]

Awesome that the iNat team is growing! I think you all are doing such useful work.

I would second most of Charlie's and Cassi's suggestions (also seconded by others here), in particular having some sort of student level account, being able to connect a single observation to multiple users, and perhaps investing in a "pro" app with added functionality for more protocol-driven citizen science projects.

Student accounts could not only help control the influx of low-quality observations aligned with the school term, but also provide a more streamlined introduction to iNat. It could also be nice to limit some of the permissions on student accounts to, again, help maintain higher data quality; e.g. not allowing them to create new metadata fields or projects. I know that some of the instructors I work with would also love to be able to restrict access to iNat's computer vision technology for students who are supposed to be doing their own identifications.

The idea of a pro-app maybe doesn't fit the scope of where iNat wants to be, but I see a big need for it in various biodiversity research communities. For example, natural history museums I have worked at that manage citizen science programs often need to create their own bespoke databases and user interfaces to capture and maintain the program's data. Not only is this expensive, but the longevity of such technology is brief and often tied to individual staff members, who inevitably move on and leave technological messes. One of my pet peeves is when lots of time, thought, and money goes into citizen science programs that are designed to (and could have) real research potential but then they don't simply because their data is managed poorly and not accessible in a research-friendly delivery format. iNat is one of the most with-it platforms for citizen science, and has already solved a lot of the problems that IMO individual projects should never have to re-solve for themselves, for example: managing user accounts, validating data entered against a current taxonomic authority, allowing data to be exported by the user, publishing data to GBIF, etc. etc. etc. The reason I see many projects not using iNat is that it doesn't facilitate protocol-driven data collection, e.g. observing on a Pollard transect. The base of such data, however, is still an observation of an organism at a time and place, which is why I think it could fit with iNat's model. Museums would happily pay a reasonable amount for the right technology, and I would imagine other citizen science programs, agencies, even individual researchers would too.

I also greatly support some kind of cleanup on duplicate metadata fields, although accomplishing that seems like it would be a beast. Maybe it would help if iNat asked "are you sure you don't mean XYZ?" when a user goes to add a new metadata field? I know iNat already suggests fields that exist, but this could be a second step to try and catch duplicate concepts.

Thanks!

Erica

[phidippu...@gmail.com]

I feel like this is the opportunity for iNat to make, by several minor changes, a huge leap forward in both usability and acceptance.

Here are some suggestions that come to my mind:

I'd like the different features to be better linked among the iNat sub-webpages:

 

- Facilitate adding observations to projects: when I want to add many sightings to a project, it would be neat to be able to add them directly via the project site by using filters (e.g. for taxa, places, tags etc), similar to the filters used for searching for observations. There should be no necessity to generate a csv file from your iNat observations to then re-upload them into a project.

 

- I am also missing a button where I can directly add one of my existing observations to one of my (non-life) lists. Also, it would be great to have other options for life lists (i.e. lists that get automatically populated), e.g. by defining a circle around your home without the need to generate a new place or by adding a tag (e.g species seen on the way to work).

 

- I am trying to be consequent with adding annotations, because I consider phenological input by the community to become very important data sets. But I cannot add those data directly when adding an observation (in contrast to options for tags, projects or fields, which I rarely use). I can only add annotations for already existing observations, so I have always to go back after uploading and might also miss/forget some of my observations. It would be great to have 'add annotations' also implemented in the mobile app versions.

 

- Another topic is the quite messy situation with the dashboard. I don't want to miss notifications or disagreeing IDs. In addition to the separation of personal messages on the one side and the rest of the notifications on the other side, as it is the status quo, I would prefer to have a better organized personal space with notifications thematically ordered, like (dis-)agreements with own observations, IDs made for others, comments, (responses to) flags... and make this all searchable. Maybe, within notifications, also assign different colors or symbols to confirming IDs vs. disagreements and coarser IDs, respectively.

Ideally, this all would become more like a forum structure, where the google group discussions would also merge into.

 

And please make it better visible (e.g. by unlinking it) when someone adds an ID plus makes a comment in the 'tell us why' field.

 

- Also, there is an overwhelming amount of valuable information hidden in the comments under an observation (like ID tips, additional information about that species, other user experiences etc.) Instead of bookmarking the link or to fave the obs, it would be nice to have the option to collect those contributions (like fave a certain comment within an obs) and tag it with keywords (-> creating a sort of iNat bibliography in your personal space).

Way to go, iNat team!

[paloma]

I agree with the last suggestion of phidippu . . . that the comments in observations need to be retrievable in some efficient manner. The identification discussions are supposed to be iNaturalist's core, but they are very difficult to access.

[Chris Cheatle]

I assume the retreat is over, and hopefully went well, but I hope ideas are still welcome.

This just came to me as working on something else, so just adding it to the stuff I wrote above.

- figure out a way to try and leverage and promote the use of the existing connectors to other platforms. For instance the link to Flickr. Just today I was looking at a group I belong to there which collects photos that must be geocoded. The first photo in the pool today is a beautiful bird from the Amazon with less than 10 records ever submitted in iNat ( https://www.flickr.com/photos/101563641@N03/25742910367/in/pool-mapbirds/ ). I remember there is some kind of invitation process, but cant remember where it is or how to use it.  If even 1 in 20 people who post pictures to Flickr can be reached and convinced to link up their accounts to an iNat account, imagine what could come through.

[David K]

Chris - here is the flickr invite link: https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/inviter

I've had reasonable success inviting new users over.  If the flickr account is stale, then responses go way down

[Julien Renoult]

Hi, 

- clean up the website, for example :

* Find a way to constrain/motivate poeple to enter "clean" or "exploitable" observations. The number of observers has really increased over the last months but not necessarily "serious" naturalists. It is nice that everybody can participate, but I am starting to get bored by seing landscape pictures taken with a smartphone with the name of an hypothetical bird species behind the picture. And I think the increase of low-quality data can afraid potentially new kin naturalists. Several ideas have been already discussed (rating picture quality and options for sorting observation by picture quality, or just allow not displaying observations with "poor-quality" rates, etc...)

* clean the annotation field

* homogenize the typography of species and place names (I think this is in progress)

- Allow linking one observation to multiple observers. This is not only a feature that I would like to see personally, but more generally I think this can promote the participation of naturalist groups/associations.

- Improve the "list" section. Even through this is not useful for the community, around me many naturalists who could enter interesting observations are also kin listers and improving this part of the website would certainly motivate them participating and ultimately posting observations. I could give many ideas on how to improve the "list" section but this is not the topic here.

- In the same vein, more options to view observations could interest poeple who wants to use iNat as a numeric museum, notably taxonomists (e.g., a better diaporama system, the possibility to view side by side two pictures to compare individuals etc...).

- Reassure poeple that iNat will not close tomorrow. There are many databases, poeple want to be sure they do a long-term investment (when you spend hundred of hours entering observations, this is an investment).

- NEVER remove the possibility to download excel tabs of data. The main strength of iNat is that it is an opendata source.

[Colin Purrington]

I'm probably ignorant and it already exists ... but would be nice to have place to add/read ID tips for taxa. On Taxonomy page, perhaps, or on Similar Species page? Or on a (new) Identification tab. On BugGuide it's on the Info page ... and often has images with arrows and such explaining the ID tricks. This same page could have links to outside pages or to helpful comments on an existing Observation. 

[Colin Purrington]

One additional idea for social platforms, particularly Twitter: posts about the Unknown Unknowns. A neglected but well-photographed Unknown observation is selected and followers are given the link and a challenge to ID it.

[Ashley Satterfield]

I would LOVE to be able to administer Student Accounts.  We are expanding our BioBlitz program to reach more than 3900 students next year.  We have been hosting field trip BioBlitzes for 4 years now, and will be working with every 5th grader next year in our district.  Schools will have the option of visiting us to work with our naturalists, or us visiting the school to work with students and parents.  Because of privacy concerns for children under 13, students cannot use their own log-ins and must use ours.  However, students using our log-ins in the past have changed passwords, put up inappropriate profile pictures, or changed the location polygons.  I have 17 different log ins for student groups and camper groups, and have to log in as each to edit observations (example - splitting multiple photos into different observations or batch editing locations). 

Ideas for Student or Administered Sub-Accounts:

-Lock access to settings
-Allow an Admin to access/edit information without logging in as the User
-Allow observations to be shared with others logged under an Admin so that teachers can access their class observations

We currently encourage schools to check back in on our Project so they can filter the results to get their class data.  Our Project is online at https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/belmontbioblitz, and we are trying to figure out the best way to allow students to compare their information with other schools, use aggregate data to influence local government policies, and use their findings to evaluate their schoolyard habitat. Any suggestions or changes to the way students interact with the app is appreciated!

[Carrie Seltzer]

Hi folks,

Thank you to everyone who contributed to this thread (and others) to provide suggestions. We need to synthesize the notes from the team discussions and will share that next week, both to the google group and on the iNat blog. Thanks again for all of your thoughts and efforts to make this community even better.

Best,

Carrie

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[John Bestevaar]

Hi Carrie
I am a founding member of Tamborine Mountain Landcare inc. Australia. We are a small not for profit community volunteers org. I am looking for an way to engage our ordinary community members in environmental matters. There is a local closed FB group called "Tamborine Mountain Wildife Pics. It is to my mind the best way to attract local people to get involved. They get to maintain community connections while having fun posting pics of local wildlie. So Inaturalist might look to creating this kind of interface or start a FB group where members can maintain local connections.

[Joe MDO]

Is there a way to add foreign language subtitles to some of the vimeo videos on the iNaturalist page? I speak Portuguese and am currently trying to recruit Brazilians in particularly underrepresented areas (mostly the Northeast region for now). I have been searching hashtags like #avesdealagoas (birds of Alagoas- a state of Brazil) and other similar ones and then commenting on the photos mentioning how iNaturalist works but I feel like it's a lot to explain in a little comment and I don't want to scare people off by ranting and raving about how it can be a game changer for education. 

It would be convenient if I could recommend watching a video subtitled in Portuguese (or whatever other target language) where everything is already so eloquently explained by biologists, authors etc. on your vimeo page). I also really liked Loarie's Colombia talk! 

Watching these videos has really pushed me to spend even more time trying to contribute with observations and IDs so I figure many like-minded wildlife photographers from instagram might feel inclined to make an account and start posting! The catch of course is that the videos are only in English. I would love to translate them into Portuguese so I can include a link when I comment on people's instagram posts.

Thanks,

Joe

[Tony Iwane]

Hi Joe, 

I'm Tony, I make iNat's videos (at least the newer ones, and tutorials). We'd love to have subtitles in Portuguese (and other languages) but can't really make them in-house. A group from Colombia made the ones we're using for Spanish with Amara (there's a free option) and sent us the subtitle file. I can then add it as an option for the video. You can email me directly at tiw...@inaturalist.org if this is something you'd like to do. We would really appreciate it.

Tony Iwane