I am trying this out, it is supposed to be a listing of who is doing observation of the month for each month so we don’t get confused. You can volunteer for any month that is currently free. Just let me know and I will put your name in assuming it still lets me edit this post. This post should remain pinned to the top of general discussion so should be easy to find.
2023 Dec mags49
2024 Jan JoC
2024 Feb dejayM
2024 March NorthernTeacher
2024 April dejayM
2024 May Janice
2024 June
2024 July Luisa
2024 Aug
2024 Sept
I am not comfortably settled in iSpot at the mo but WILL be happy to help out again
In some respects, it MIGHT be better to leave the process til the last few days and then hit it hard in a consolidated and systematic way - I honestly suspect a user voting system won’t work very well
I made the possible mistake, maybe like the other three, of checking and choosing every day or so.
I am prepared to try that process (last few days) quite soon, say for May (Mike) IF you think we are failing and that it is OK for someone to do more than one. I will step up with a few days to spare anytime if it gets that far.
Re
I agree, I think an individual contributor’s opinion is a valid way to highlight variety across contributions and contributors.
I came to say something similar - it would be great to have others get on board and make their own choices. But I could if need be and if thought appropriate to do a second one, do May or June. Can’t do April anyway, will be away towards the end of the month.
I’m not so thirled to speedy operations though! Great to see the Obs of the Month so promptly after end of month in each case but my own, but my fairness hat says let the whole month go by before final selection. And would-be volunteers, however they might get through the task, would hopefully not be put off by high expectations re speed?
It’s such a great roll-call so far, all different, deserving and interesting. Hope there are others out there who’d like to make the selection in this and the coming months.
I wouldn’t personally want to leave the whole process until too near the end with the likely high numbers.
Completely agree with the great variety in the roll-call, too. I certainly didn’t know where it would lead for me and doubt whether a voting system would work unless it was based on something like Best in Group but that would restrict choice.
Have put Janice (ispot admin) in for May and she agreed as I wanted to make sure she does at least one of these to get an idea of the breadth of ispot observations by looking at large numbers in a concentrated period.
It would also be good to get a few more people having a go as it is very interesting looking at every observation and thinking about the ones that might be best/favourite in some of the groups. Not sure how best to encourage more.
Hi Mike, I’m happy to have a go at July or August - I’m stacked out with work until then. However, I would just need a little bit of support/advice on how to set it up as I’m not very techy - eg how do you set it up so it pulls them all together. I’ve only ever used tags to do that before.
Also I know it’s very early in the month and that it’s the choice of whoever is doing it this month, but this from stevesmailes is just wonderful.
As Miked will soon explain, all we do select the winner and Hononrary mentions and the ispot team do the techy bit of posting the results.
Don’t worry about the detail - plenty of time for that!!
The thing is to review the batch of obs on an ongoing basis in the month - or indeed in one massive session at the end of the month with lots of tea/coffee/beverage of choice. I am a simple soul and find the best way to do that is to use filtering, and save the filter which is then only seen by me. A practice of filtering would be a good idea before your slot unless you already use this for other things - easy, interesting and private to yourself as you find what you want. I kept a list of the candidate obs urls copied from the top of the screen on a separate document in a wee table with group (bird etc), relevant date for the obs, date added to my table (know where left off last time) and a short phrase noting what interested me about it. Column for reviewing and adding marks/stars/points added to help with getting to the final decision on which ones to include.
Explore community - map - filter observations and then try out how it works - filter for dates is what you will need for this task, you’ll see there’s choices for that. 
1 Like
That’s so helpful thanks very much!
Have pencilled you in for July. Let me know if you can’t make it or want to shift.
As others have mentioned all that is needed is to send me is the one observation you want to make observation of the month i.e. as a very minimum you could just send me that one observation. But generally others prefer to write a few words about why they chose that one and give a few honorable mentions as well.
You can write as much or as little as you want, fewer words makes it a bit easier for me but that should not be a consideration!
Ok great - thanks Mike, I’ll do that - do I need your email address or something or is there a way of messaging you within the site?
This fox story is quite nice.
1 Like
I suspect April will be a bumper month for interesting observations.
Just wanted to check one thing please, in previous months have people included global observations or just stuck to UK and Ireland?
When I did the January one I trawled globally to see everything on offer.
1 Like
It is up to you, doing everything is more effort of course but it might highlight a particularly interesting that people will miss otherwise.
1 Like
I did not look very hard at Global Obs and did not include any in my summary
I have collected a few this month and will remark upon some
Currently with 4 days to go, there are 929 UK&Is and 113 true Global ones
One is a bee in Greenland waters
15 very nice ones are currently disqualified
My end of month summary is likely to be shorter and a day late