Changes to Projects 2015-05-05
May 12 Update: these changes are now live. If you have any questions, comments, or bug reports, please head on over to our Google Group.
On May 12th we’re making some changes to the way observations get added to projects.
In the past, an observation could only be added to projects by the observation’s creator. This made for a lot of demand by project teams for tools that would make it easier for them to solicit observations to their projects. As a result we created project invitations, which allowed project teams and other project members to invite observations to the project. The observation’s creator could then accept or decline these invitations.
This created two problems: one, it was annoying for project managers to constantly invite observations to their project and then wait for the observer to accept the invitation, which they might never do. Two, the invitations could be annoying to observers and felt more like spam the more they received.
To address these problems, we’re removing project invitations and replacing them with tools that allow any project team member to add any observation to their project. This does not mean that the project will have access to the private location data of the observations they add (see below for details). If you don’t like the idea of all projects being able to add your observations without your explicit permission, you’ll be able to opt out of this change in your account settings:
The new version of the “Add from your observations” tool will be essentially unchanged and the “Invite observations” link for project teams will be called “Find suitable observations” and work by the same principle of finding suitable observations according to the project rules that are not yet in the project. We’ve also made an “Aggregator” tool which allows you to set your project to automatically search for and add suitable observations if your project has at least a taxon or medium sized place rule constraint. However, we’re only making the aggregator available to trusted partners who intend to use the data for monitoring or scientific purposes because of it’s high potential for misuse. If you really think you need it, write us at help@inaturalist.org and explain how you intend to use the data.
How does this change access to private coordinates?
Short answer is that it doesn’t change how things used to work, but it does give you more options. In the past, joining a project was a requirement for adding your observations to that project, and required you to agree to share private location data with the project team.
While joining is no longer a requirement for adding observations to a project, it is still a requirement for sharing private location data by default: when you join a project the private coordinates of the observations that you add will be shared with the project team. However, you now have the option to trust a project team with access to private coordinates of any of your observations that they might add to their project. Likewise, you can join a project without agreeing to share any private coordinates.
Changes to how projects display
We’ve added bioblitz-style stats and leaderboards to the top of all projects and replaced the feed of recent observations with a bioblitz-style grid of images. We’ve also removed the project types of “contest” and “observation contest” since all these did was display now redundant leaderboards.
All of these changes will go live on May 12th, but we wanted to let you know now so you'll know what's happening and be prepared to change your settings if you'd like to opt-out of these changes.
Comentarios
Agregar un comentario