We recently launched a new Cartographer web site featuring some new features for organising large citizen science monitoring initiatives. We’ve used these features to streamline the organization of several large projects.

If you see a message like this in your workspace, it means your data has moved! Don’t worry, though - you just have to click through to find it. The rest of this page will explain what’s moved, why we moved it, and how things are laid out now:

What’s Moved?

The following projects are affected by these changes. These are all projects that used to use our “collaborative surveys” model where different workspaces could collaborate to collect data:

Where Has the Data Gone?

As the screenshot suggests, we’ve moved data for these projects under their respective “home” workspaces:

• The Modular River Survey workspace:
• The Riverfly workspace
• The Priority Habitats workspace

We’ve created projects to house the data in each workspace and teams to organise people in each project. The teams correspond to the workspaces in the old collaborative survey model.

Why Has This Changed?

The old “collaborative surveys” model allowed workspaces to “collaborate” to collect data for certain surveys like those listed above. However, it had a number of drawbacks. For example:

1. Collaborative vs Non-Collaborative Surveys The difference between collaborative and non-collaborative surveys was confusing. Many users didn’t understand what these terms meant, and many didn’t know how to tell which surveys were collaborative and which were not.
2. Centralised Coordination No single workspace in a collaborative survey had an overview of everything that was going on. This made it difficult to support centrally managed national projects.

In the new Cartographer web site, we’ve rearranged collaborative surveys as “multi-team projects” to address these problems:

1. Collaborative vs Non-Collaborative Surveys The distinction between “collaborative” and “non-collaborative” has now gone. Instead, some projects are split into teams, but this distinction can simply be ignored by most users.
2. Centralised Coordination It is now possible to put people in approver or coordinator roles for a whole project or a single team. This supports central oversight of a project as well as team self-sufficiency.

What About the Old Web Site?

The old Cartographer web site and the Cartographer mobile app still show these large citizen science projects using the collaborative model. We’ve done a lot of work behind the scenes to map teams in the new web site onto workspaces in the old, so we can maintain these two different views simultaneously. Data collected in old web site will show up in the correct place on the new web site and vice versa.

We are currently working on bringing projects and teams to the Cartographer mobile app. Once this work is complete, we will completely retire the old web site and “collaborative surveys” will be no more. In the mean time, the old web site and the mobile will continue to function as they did before.