Why I Left iNaturalist

Summary

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. This post is an announcement for those who were unaware, an explanation for those who are confused, and a record so I don’t forget. Some History I wanted to build something like iNat shortly after I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2003. In 2007 I attended the UC Berkeley School of Information and built it along with my fellow students and co-founders Nate Agrin and Jess Kline. Nate and I worked on it a bit in our spare time after graduating, and I started collaborating with Scott in 2009, still in our spare time. Scott was instrumental in recruitment, funding, and collaboration, and we formed an LLC together as a way to have a bank account to accept funds to build out functionality like the first iPhone and Android apps. In 2014 we joined the California Academy of Sciences (CAS) in the hope of gaining access to more resources to hire more staff, which we did and thus survived almost a decade of growth in usage. In 2023 we left CAS after arduous negotiations and formed an independent non-profit. Up to this point, iNat functioned as an unstructured anarchy. Scott and I were titular “co-directors” but we did not provide a lot of direction and most of the big moves and features were driven largely by individual initiative. We never found a great way to collaborate. We struggled to set collective goals that might override individual ones, we struggled to keep longer-term goals in mind amid day-to-day firefighting, and we remained merely the sum of our parts, if that. Toward the end of our time at CAS we experimented with sociocracy as a way to organize without hierarchy and coercion, but despit...