iNaturalist Data Explorer

[wykhuh]

Project Lead: Wai-Yin Kwan (wykhuh)
Mentor: Bruno E. Soares, PhD

Week 1 (week starting 13 September 2021): Meet your mentor!

• Meet mentor for 30 minutes
• Create an account on GitHub
• Check if you have access to the HackMD notes set up for your meetings with your mentor
• Prepare to meet your mentor(s) by completing a short homework provided in your shared notes
• Complete your own copy of the open leadership self-assessment and share it to your mentor
  If you're a group, each teammate should complete this assessment individually. This is here to help you set your own personal goals during the program. No need to share your results, but be ready to share your thoughts with your mentor.
• [x ] Make sure you know when and how you'll be meeting with your mentor.

Before Week 2 (week starting 20 September 2021): Cohort Call (Welcome to Open Life Science!)

• Attend call or catch up via YouTube

• [x ] Create an issue on the OLS-4 GitHub repository for your OLS work and share the link to your mentor.

• [x ] Draft a brief vision statement using your goals

  This lesson from the Open Leadership Training Series (OLTS) might be helpful

• Leave a comment on this issue with your draft vision statement & be ready to share this on the call

• Check the Syllabus for notes and connection info for all the cohort calls.

Before Week 3 (week starting 27 September 2021): Meet your mentor!

• Meet mentor
• Look up two other projects and comment on their issues with feedback on their vision statement
• Complete this compare and contrast assignment about current and desired community interactions and value exchanges
• Complete your Open Canvas (instructions, canvas)
• Share a link to your Open Canvas in your GitHub issue
• Start your Roadmap
• Comment on your issue with your draft Roadmap
• Suggest a cohort name at the bottom of the shared notes and vote on your favorite with a +1

Before Week 4: Cohort Call (Tooling and roadmapping for Open projects)

• Attend call or catch up via YouTube
• Look up two other projects and comment on their issues with feedback on their open canvas.

Week 5 and later

• Meet mentor
• Create a GitHub repository for your project
• Add the link to your repository in your issue
• Use your canvas to start writing a README.md file, or landing page, for your project
• Link to your README in a comment on this issue
• Add an open license to your repository as a file called LICENSE.md
• Add a Code of Conduct to your repository as a file called CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
• Invite new contributors to into your work!

This issue is here to help you keep track of work as you start Open Life Science program. Please refer to the OLS-4 Syllabus for more detailed weekly notes and assignments past week 4.

Week 6

• Attend call or catch up via YouTube

Week 7

• Meet mentor

Week 8

• Attend call or catch up via YouTube

Week 9

• Meet mentor

Week 10

• Attend call or catch up via YouTube

Week 11

• Meet mentor

Week 12

• Attend call or catch up via YouTube

Week 13

• Meet mentor

Week 14

• Attend call or catch up via YouTube

Week 15

• Meet mentor

[wykhuh]

Vision Statement

Citizen science aims to give the general public a chance to participate in science. But by limiting the participation to just data collecting, and leaving data analysis to "real" scientists, that further reinforces the divide between the non-scientists and scientists. I want to create a discovery-based, data exploration experience for iNaturalist citizen scientists where they can browse through iNaturalist and environmental data, form their own questions, look for answers to their own questions, and thereby gain a better understanding of the nature of science.

[adelsarvary]

This sounds great, Wai-Yin, and there's an increasing demand for this kind of inclusion, and for 'owning' the data we collect as citizen scientists! Are you planning to co-design this experience with the target audience? I guess I'm just missing the part of the vision that suggests who you are planning to work with on this great project.

[wykhuh]

@adelsarvary I'm planning on reaching out to iNaturalist project organizers to co-develop a beta version the site. Here's a revised vision statement.

Vision Statement revision

Citizen science aims to give the general public a chance to participate in science. But by limiting the participation to just data collecting, and leaving data analysis to "real" scientists, that can further reinforce the divide between the non-scientists and scientists. I will work with iNaturalist project organizers to create a site that allows project organizers to import their iNaturalist data, upload education materials, and add pre-built interactive data exploration tools for their project. By giving citizen scientists the chance to explore the data that they help collect, I hope citizen scientists will be encouraged to form their own questions, look for answers to their own questions, and thereby create a more engaging experience for both participants and organizers.

[wykhuh]

Github repo with readme, code of conduct, and license. https://github.com/wykhuh/inaturalist_data_explorer

[nadinespy]

Hi @adelsarvary, this sounds very interesting! You say that excluding the public from scientific analysis further "reinforces the division between the non-scientists and scientists" - I'm not particularly familiar with the motifs of citizen science, but I'm wondering whether you could explicate a bit more why that division should be weakened. Is it because science itself improves in quality by including non-scientists? Or is the primary benefit that there's a stronger "division of tasks" by non-scientists asking and answering questions for themselves and finding solutions that work for them? (If so, is citizen science more about including people in applied rather than foundational science?) Again, I'm not familiar with the reasoning/principles behind citizen science - but the vision statement as it is right now appears to me a bit elusive in terms of the underlying motivation. You do say at the end that "by giving citizen scientists the chance to explore the data that they help collect, citizen scientists will be encouraged to form their own questions, look for answers to their own questions, and thereby create a more engaging experience for both participants and organizers" - here it sounds like what you're aiming at it is engagement which is different from including citizens in scientific analysis itself.

Sorry, if the text is too long - I guess, this well reflects my difficulty to grasp whether you're project is about increasing engagement of the public, or enabling the public in impacting actual scientific analysis, or both. :D

[acocac]

Hi @wykhuh, congrats for the project. I'm strongly convinced of the pivotal role of citizen science to tackle key environmental issues. The revised vision statement looks ok for me, however, it would be great if you can expand more what sort of education materials will be allowed in the iNaturalist platform. Education materials for other iNaturalist users, for a certain age group?
Finally, regarding the concern of @nadinespy, I agree that the statement sounds that it is more about engagement rather than including citizens in scientific analysis itself. For your roadmap, I would suggest to have look at some useful resources of citizen science, see for instance this recent Open Access Book which provides some underlying concepts and study cases across different domains, incl. environmental sciences.

[manulera]

Hi @wykhuh that sounds like a very interesting project, and it makes sense that people also participate throughout the data lifecycle in citizen science, not only the acquisition.

Having a very superficial look at the iNaturalist site, it seems that most contributions are pictures of animals. What are the kind of analysis that you envision for such kind of data and how would the platform look like? I think a hypothetical example of a particular use-case would help get a better idea of how the final site will look like.