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 despite my enthusiasm for the form, we didn’t start with universal buy-in or understanding from the whole team, we didn’t fully adopt its structures, and, like many democracies before us, we ultimately voted to abolish our own democracy when we formed the “leadership circle” and created a hierarchy.
The leadership circle was me, Scott, and Carrie. We didn’t have clearly-defined roles, but our mandate was navigating the separation from CAS while forming a new organization, which meant lots of talking with lawyers, understanding the requirements of tax-exempt status, forming a new board and writing its bylaws. I had very little interest in any of it and to my discredit, I let Carrie and Scott do most of the work. When we did need to make decisions, I was generally the minority, e.g. in how much to disclose in our negotiations with CAS ( IMO everything) or whether board members should be required to donate money ( IMO no, plutocracy is bad at all times and at all levels). In addition to constantly feeling like the losing vote, the “leadership circle” was sliding into becoming a Leadership team of department heads, and being a dis-empowered leader of people doing the actual work wasn’t what I wanted, so I stepped down and was officially just an engineer, work I’d been doing all along anyway.
The new mobile app (which we were calling “iNat Next” and is now simply “iNaturalist,” the older app becoming “iNaturalist Classic”… still following? I’m going to refer to them as “iNat Next” and “iNat Classic” for clarity) was proving to be more work than the team dedicated to it could handle, so I put all of my time into that. We hired two new staff to work on it, and did our best to reconcile what little guidance we got from Leadership with an internal process focused on discussion and consent. By late 2024, the app wasn’t what anyone wanted it to be, but we had soft-launched on iPhone and were iteratively improving. At this point Leadership started establishing arbitrary goals like a hard launch with promotion in time for City Nature Challenge 2025 with the hopes of getting featured in the Apple App Store. They insisted the app needed to be simpler, to cater first to incidental users who wanted a quick answer, to be a friction-less path to a feeling of contribution. I don’t believe that’s possible while also serving existing users who value (don’t laugh) the power and nuance of iNat, including, among many other things, the way it doesn’t give you a quick answer, forcing you to consider options when making an identification. At this point it was clear to me Leadership wanted the app to be something I had no interest in using and that I didn’t believe would serve people like me, and that they were totally uninterested in hearing feedback from the team developing it, so I left and joined the web team.
Over that spring, Leadership changed direction on iNat Next again and again, shifting the baseline for what constituted a viable feature set for release and driving the team toward a deadline for getting featured in the App Store that ultimately proved fruitless when the app wasn’t featured after all. The team felt dis-empowered and Leadership seemed unwilling to listen to their complaints. Some of the team asked if I could do anything, so I tried to do what seemed like the only thing I could do in a hierarchy and communicate the problems up to the Head of Engineering and Head of Engagement (early March 2025), but there was likewise no change in behavior from Leadership in the way they managed the mobile team. I ultimately proposed restructuring product Leadership under a new Head of Product role with the explicit responsibility of consulting with workers and with users about their needs and capabilities, working closely with design and engineering staff to ensure that no one was blindsided by sudden changes in direction but also ensuring no team was left without product direction (17 April 2025). I proposed that this role have independent control over product decisions to resist impulses from the rest of Leadership to override existing priorities before work could be tested by use. I also proposed that I could do the job.
A day later, Leadership informed me they had no intention of adopting my proposal (“We’re not planning to change the Head of Product structure at this time,” 18 April 2025, referring the three-member sub-group of the Leadership team that was making product decisions at the time). A few days after that Scott announced that he was taking on an additional role to his Executive Director responsibilities: Head of Product (circa 21 April 2025). On 5 May 2025, the Leadership team summoned everyone who worked on iNat Next into an agenda-less meeting titled “post launch Strategic alignment” and announced that they would offer us half a year’s pay to quit. Offended and incensed that they would rather so many staff leave than listening to and addressing their concerns, I decided iNaturalist was no longer an organization I wanted to work for and I told them to write up the offer. I consulted with friends and advisors, who all suggested that I take longer to decide, perhaps on a sabbatical. Leadership agreed to that, so I tried to spend the last few months thinking about whether I could remain in an organization led by people in whom I have lost so much faith. In the interim, most of the recipients of that buyout offer left the organization, as well as another engineer, and the Head of Engineering, resulting in a 30% attrition in staff. The org is trying to fill that gap with the three new engineers that have been hired for the mobile team, former board member Dan Rademacher joining staff as Head of Product (though not, apparently, with the independence I proposed, so responsibility without the necessary power), and hiring two more engineers for the web/ops team (in progress, to my knowledge).
As I was leaving, the Google gen AI debacle happened, a fiasco big enough to merit description in Scientific American. This was an own goal. iNat’s Engagement team predicted the backlash but the Leadership team chose not to listen to their warning. I was not involved in this grant, its announcement, or its fulfillment, but while it didn’t directly lead to my own choice to leave, it is symptomatic of the problems that led to that choice, and I think it played a role convincing more staff to quit. In my discussions with staff since, almost everyone recalled being blindsided by the announcement of the grant and confused about what the money was going to be used for.
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