Bid submitted — but not funded
Jon Rosewell submitted a bid for JISC funding for an iSpot related proposal:
iSpot User-Contributed Keys
iSpot is a social networking website that connects beginners in natural history with experts who help identify organisms from photographs and descriptions. We also provide iSpot Bayesian keys, a novel form of
interactive key to help identify plants and animals. These keys are now available through the web on the desktop and on mobile phones. By using this new form of key, we have also made the creation of keys
much easier.The proposed project will open up the authoring, reviewing and development of keys to a much wider public. We will do this by combining the commenting and discussion features already on iSpot with the existing authoring features for keys. This will make it possible for any user to start a new key and for others to comment and discuss, allowing groups of users to collaborate on improving keys. We will use experts from our existing network of collaborators to seed this activity in addition to encouraging the full iSpot community to create, use and comment on new keys.
By empowering many more individuals to create identification keys, we can increase their number, their taxonomic range and their use. This has the potential to feed through to more extensive collection of
biodiversity data.
Unfortunately this wasn’t successful, but another iSpot bid in the same funding call was funded. This was for a project called iSpot local; read more on Doug Clow‘s blog.