I disagree: but I understand your viewpoint.
I think that there are two issues here:
- What is the site philosophy. So this has been the stance of iSpot UK and I respect that. It was part of the UK site philosophy and to change it would be wrong.
However, it was not part of the southern African site philosophy when we started as an independent site. Unlike the Uk where iSpot is just another tool and a “quickly get an ID” tool at that, in southern Africa we decided to use iSpot as our tool for biorecording, to be used by scientists, conservation planners, environmental practitioners and national projects (just as our marine SeaKeys, our alien Rapdi Response, our Western Leopard Toad monitoring and other projects such as Redlisting, Roadkill, and so forth. So our philosophy was if you dont want a permanent record, dont use iSpot; you are welcome to delete your observation until someone else has contributed to it, after which it is a communal record and no longer yours alone to decide. Part of our problem is legal: if we make some planning decision to say stop a development based on iSpot data, we dont want the developers (or any other action or lobby group) to buy off users and get them to remove some data.
However, when the site were amalgamated our instructions to users were just eliminated and the UKs philosophy was without any discussion or warning foisted on us. For instance, our users who were participating in several nest recording schemes suddenly discovered that this was "illegal’ on iSpot.
So whilst I appreciate your view from a UK standpoint, I do not find it acceptable from the southern African perspective: if you wish to retain the “delete” philosophy, then dont use ZA iSpot: go and find another Virtual Museum to play with.
2 But even in the UK (on the old site, not this travesty) , you cannot withdraw an ID! You cannot edit or delete a comment or reply once it has been replied to. So for most of the content of the site you dont have the option you claim to regard as sacrosanct anyway: what is the difference between applying this to IDs and comments compared to observations.
As I said the UK site is a mere ID service, it does not matter, but for southern Africa there are major legal implications if observations are removed. What is crucial though is that users understand this when the contribute to the site in the first place.
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Not much I can say to your extensive views Tony - I didn’t realise this site is now apparently dedicated to the “South African Philosophy” - shame that - doesn’t seem much point in simple people like me from the UK who do wish to use it mainly as “an ID tool”. Very sad that the site seems now to have been programmed by & taken over by individuals who no-longer value the previous ethos of iSpot.
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After reading Tony’s post, I do not think that this is what he is advocating… What I do believe, and in this I concur, is that Tony is advocating that each Community should have it’s own Philosophy based on the specific Communities needs. Thus then each community’s Philosophy should be respected.
You are welcome to use it as an ID tool (but it does not even function as that at present), but other communities have loftier goals. After all you now have interactions and projects and the browser: clearly geared more towards our southern African philosophy of a one-stop-biodiversity-shop than a post-for-quick-ID-and-forget site . If your only need is for a simple ID tool for simple users, then you are welcome to that. But please dont decry others, who wish to ALSO use it for teaching, conservation, planning, research, local, provincial and national projects, and mentor-trainee purposes, their rights to enjoy the site for such goals.
Thinking about the subject, If I had taken the time to identify someone’s observation, and that observation was subsequently deleted - that would be the last time that I took the trouble to identify any further observation from that user. What would the use be? Does it help any other user recognize the species after it has been deleted.?
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Spot on! If I identified a plant for you and you deleted it, that would the be very last ID I would do for you. And I am aware of half a dozen other southern Africans who follow that philosophy. What is more I will tell you each time you post another observation that I and others will not ID this because you are disrespectful and ungrateful.
Saw it yesterday: should have followed my instinct and made it a Tokkie.
Really cool: I had no idea it was so special, it certainly looked kewl!
Hi again - I do think you South African guys, who obviously have “loftier goals”, have got the wrong end of the stick here - as I reiterated above on the ONE occasion to which I refered, when I did “unpublish” it was in order to attempt to have my related re-post appear correctly - this unfortunately didn’t happen. As I said it is not something that I am in a habbit of doing.
For you to make threats as to what action you & others might take if I was to “unpublish” again is well out of order !!
If you have nothing better to do than monitor my posts I suggest you need to get out more & get a life.
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Dont flatter yourself: I am monitoring dejayM’s posts not yours.
But I agree: I should get out more and get a life.
How many observations have you posted?
It is very tempting to look for workarounds - I do, and have. But as Tony says we should keep reporting errors even old and known ones. We need someone here in the Fora, to go through all the (disjointed?) Posts,Threads and Themes and make a clean list of Errors and bugs. For ANYONE to find what’s wrong with iSpot, they will either have to be a demanding user for a day or well I don’t know. We seem to be getting nowhere here…
Have you read this on the home page https://www.ispotnature.org/ Adding observations to iSpot (updated July 2017) - not any help to US here.
Discovering workarounds is how one learns to navigate the site.
It is when old functionality requires a convoluted workaround that frustration sets in!
COPIED (Pasted) HERE and in a few other places
I have just found this on the Front Page dated July 4 (sorry if I seem dozy)
“Could you give us an ETA on the implementation of the Track and Changes?” vynbos
Hi - I cannot give you an ETA for this quite yet, but please be re-assured that we are looking at this functionality right now. It’s not a case of simply re-enabling the feature, as the new site is now on different technologies from the old site; we need to re-develop the functionality. The benefit of this will be that we can build a much more useable and flexible feature that isn’t constrained and slowed down by the old Drupal CMS. First thing is first, we need to get something in place that allows you all to see what activity has taken place.
The team have put in a huge effort to get us to the point where we have a site which is sustainable and fit for the future, as opposed to no site at all. We do appreciate your patience, feedback and support … please stick with us!"
Is from Kevin McLeod https://forum.ispotnature.org/u/kevmcleod/summary
There’s clearly an issue of two completely different communities being cobbled together here ie. SA and Britain, but the essential root of the whole problem is that the communities who use Ispot are not in control of the platform. Ispot is controlled by a corporate body alien to the community of users, who get no say.
The only real solution to this problem would be for the communities to develop an Open Source network controlled by its users.
Other than that, aren’t we wasting our breath here on this poorly-functioning forum, as well as wasting whatever investment we make in creating all our data here for it to be used and abused however the controllers see fit?
https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/
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I totally agree that the community has the best sense of what direction a platform should go. Have you looked at more open alternatives for collecting data like https://opendatakit.org/ ? The iNaturalist software that I help develop is open source https://github.com/inaturalist and has been forked/adopted/controlled by local groups with these same concerns, e.g. http://natusfera.gbif.es/ (though our preference would be for them to be loosely coupled via the iNaturalist network: http://www.inaturalist.org/pages/network)
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Hi Loarie, thanks for your response, yes, the more the community is involved - at all stages and levels - the better the platform will function and do the vital job, imo. The old top-down, paternalistic ways of organising are increasingly obsolete in the modern world
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However, the problem here as so often, is one of Lock-In, ie people have become locked in to a particular platform due to the amount of time and effort that individuals and groups have devoted to that platform. In the case of Ispot many have spent years building up the database of observations here, but sadly ownership and control seems to rest with a small group of Open University paid employees who, as far as appears from their lack of interaction and engagement with this forum, appear to have zero respect for the community and all the work that has been put in. If this is not correct, then please Team do let the forum know that you are listening …
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Even worse, i gather that the South African groups have committed a huge part of their national biological recording effort to the Ispot platform and, from what I’ve seen written here, this may now be in serious jeopardy due to the failure of the Ispot team to respect the expertise of the people on the ground.
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