Arquivos de periódicos de março 2015

26 de março de 2015

The purpose of inaturalist/naturewatch projects

I have been trying to sort out in my mind how to use the inaturalist/naturewatch project feature. These comments are based on looking at https://inaturalist.nz projects rather than the larger set of inaturalist.org projects.

Why have projects? My (superficial ;-) analysis discerns a number of different project types:

1) I envisage projects as places where people can work collaboratively together to achieve some aim. Members of the project are there to achieve something beyond identifying individual observations. The project includes a place where people can discuss how to run the project and achieve its ends.
For example a collaborative project to coordinate documenting all the flora or fauna in a particular area.

2) Many projects seem mainly to be used to collect together observations in one place. But this could also be done by adding "additional fields".
(eg the "Animated observations" project.)
A subgroup of these mainly serve to accumulate a check-list of species for a particular area.
(eg Cape sanctuary.)
Another subgroup of these are just to survey or count observations in a particular area, and prompt members to do the same in their area.
(eg Kārearea NZ Falcon national count
A lot of these are potentially "type 1" projects but don't have anyone or group driving them and actively processing observations added to the project.

3) A second common purpose is to gather together observations so that a group can work on all observations of a particular type and the rest of the naturewatch community can contribute by adding or inviting suitable observations to the project. This is often used by external groups looking for citizen/crowd sourced data.
(eg "Ferns with Te-Papa".)

4) Another use of projects is to prompt people to add particular useful bits of information as "additional fields" for ongoing or later analysis, this may be the entire function of the project.
(eg the "NZ Fantail Phases" project)

5) There is a class of project which is really just to define a group of users. For instance a university course exercise/assignment. A subset of type 4 above, but a closed group just for that class, and rules defining the information to enter for each observation.

6) The final type of project is one that seems to simply be to advertise the existence of some external project, but where no effort or thought seems to have gone into actually implementing anything to do on this site. I think these tend to be the result of invitations to create a project here, without an understanding or buy-in to the naturewatch model. I suppose these are still-born type 3 projects.

Posted on 26 de março de 2015, 01:28 AM by tony_wills tony_wills | 7 comentários | Deixar um comentário