Welcome wagon

I spend alot of time ID'ing other people's obs, but not as much welcoming new people to the site, partially because we don't have good ways to easily search for these new users.

I'm going to try using this journal post as a place to share the URLs of observations made within the last 24 hours that represent the user's first observation. The plan is I'll paste them in daily as comments on this post. And I'll plan to reference this list if I'm feeling like spending some time welcoming new users. Please feel free to join me or pass this post onto other who might want to help.

@tiwane, @carrieseltzer, @sambiology, @joelle I know you've each asked for functionality to try to locate these new users. This will be a poor mans version of it to see whether an welcoming interface for searching for this kind of new content is worth building.

From the last month:
www.inaturalist.org/observations/2696720 (inat)
www.inaturalist.org/observations/2696628 (inat)
www.inaturalist.org/observations/2696606 (MX)
www.inaturalist.org/observations/2696569 (inat)
www.inaturalist.org/observations/2696509 (inat)
www.inaturalist.org/observations/2696474 (inat)
www.inaturalist.org/observations/2696400 (inat)

Posted on November 3, 2015 07:16 PM by

loarie

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One of the things I did at Eyefi was create a "My first Eyefi photo" flickr group. Maybe we could have a "First iNat Observation" project? Or is that too badge-like?

Posted by alexshepard over 8 years ago

and you mean have us the community add people's first obs to the project for them? Would that just be a different way for the community to find them then this journal post, or can you think of additional benefits of having them in a project?

Posted by loarie over 8 years ago

Thanks, @loarie! Are you going to track somehow whether or not people who get comments go on to add more observations? Can you pull out those metrics?

Maybe I should start keeping a list of all of the new users I welcome.

Posted by carrieseltzer over 8 years ago

carrie - I just calculated a quick correlation between having comments and IDs and posting a second obs based on a very small sample size (3000) users and looks like there's a positive correlation of 0.14

Posted by loarie over 8 years ago

I think this is a great initiative, Scott (and I like the assessment of correlation you carried out). I'd like to have more time to be able to reach out to these new users for iNat Canada (and all users, really), but unfortunately I don't really have that time. I'm trying to recruit some Canadian Wildlife Federation volunteers to help with this and general ID/ reaching out, so maybe that'll help.
What if we were able to publish this list more generally on iNat so other frequent users can also reach out?

Posted by jpage_cwf over 8 years ago

Thanks Scott, that helps to have the country beside the observation. I'll be using this list!

Posted by jpage_cwf over 8 years ago

alex just mentioned that these daily posts of mine are taking over his dashboard. He's subscribed to this post because he commented on it. If anyone wants to know how to unsubscribe from posts like this go here: http://www.inaturalist.org/subscriptions?type=post and click unsubscribe

Posted by loarie over 8 years ago

I want to stay subscribed, but all of the comments show up in the dashboard (not just the most recent) it is a little unwieldy. Maybe start a new journal each week?

Posted by carrieseltzer over 8 years ago

I'd prefer not to start a new post because that defeats the purpose of having it be easy for people to find. I could edit the body of the post with the most recent links. Will mean you can't look back, but prob a better approach - sound good?

Posted by loarie over 8 years ago

Sure

Posted by carrieseltzer over 8 years ago

wow, you guys all got to these folks quick. i'll be on it tomrorow!

Posted by tiwane over 8 years ago

I know I've been forgetting to check this frequently. I just wanted to mention that I try to catch new Great Nature Project users every other day or so (which often happens before I check this list), but then on this list I haphazardly click a handful in the middle from iNat and welcome them. Hope some of you are starting at either the top or bottom :-)

Posted by carrieseltzer over 8 years ago

I love the new new Getting Started page! http://www.inaturalist.org/pages/getting+started

Any progress on making "new user" a search parameter? I'm much more likely to go through new observations if I can set up an RSS feed for it.

Posted by carrieseltzer about 8 years ago

Welcome wagon

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