[n8agrin]

iNaturalist was the final product of my Master's degree thesis team. I haven't contributed to it since school, about 11 years, so I don't deserve any credit for its success. The folks who have kept it alive are personal heros - they sacrificed a lot and invested so much to build the community that exists today. It's probably the project I'm still the proudest to have contributed to.

When we started, our goal was to encourage people to go outside and engage with the world around them. We dreamt that the data gathered by the community would be used in scientific research, but weren't confident it would ever reach enough of a critical mass. It has! More surprisingly, we had no idea how important iNat's image dataset would become for computer vision research.

Again, so proud of the folks who have helped to make iNaturalist thrive and so glad it still exists in the world.

[sktrdie]

Evidence that doing something great doesn’t need to be through startup-capital-based systems. One can build and study something that can be of great importance to humanity without its core values being tainted by money.