Why I left iNaturalist
After almost 18 years, I left iNaturalist, the product and organization I helped create. I left because I don’t believe the current Leadership team is pointing the product in the right direction, and I don’t think they are managing their talented staff in an empathetic or effective way. If you’d like me to continue working on natural history software, support me on Patreon.
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) sometimes go awry, in my personal opinion, is forgetting they are the custodian of citizen science data, not the source of it.
erutuon