Wow, iNaturalist co-founder @kueda goes into detail why he quit the project he started. The tl;dr is that the leadership and governance seem ill-equipped for the task at hand.
Discussion
Loading...
What stuck with me: «I also think the board should follow Wikimedia’s lead and commit to a majority of community-selected members, instead of selecting their own membership from people like them. Users should have more power in the organization. Right now they’re barely even informed about what staff are doing.»
During the iNat "AI" debacle, I wrote about better CS governance: https://tzovar.as/power-sharing/
And how iNat leaders don't understand volunteer motivations: https://tzovar.as/motivations/
Bastian Greshake Tzovaras
Power-sharing in online communities
In some ways, there has been little news in the iNaturalist ‘GenAI’ story: Beyond some vague posturing towards “going to work on improving ways to get feedback from the community”, saying (but not demonstrating) that they are ‘listening’, and somehow doing some ‘webinar’ at some point in the future, there’s...
⁂
More from
Bastian Greshake Tzovaras
Bastian Greshake Tzovaras
Being Social: Motivations in Citizen Science
tl;dr: People’s motivations to engage with online citizen science are complex and change over time Apparently, last week iNaturalist released a blog post, demoing their mock-up of how they envision using LLMs to process user-contributed wildlife observation data. Back in June, when they (or rather their funder Google) announced this...
⁂
More from
Bastian Greshake Tzovaras
Reading that blog post feels like my guesses weren't too far from the reality. Thanks for sticking up for the iNat users and all your work @kueda, I know how hard it can be to walk away when the time has come!