I have actually already contributed a decent amount to iNaturalist over the years: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?user_id=zarobi

But that's kind of the extent of "citizen science", in my area at least — some variant of taking photos and dumping them into a public database. Which is still helpful of course, but I was talking about working more intimately with specific research, or even being employed to do certain tasks.

Right now you have to be "in" to be "involved", which has it's pros and cons. In this thread we were mostly discussing the cons. You might call it quality assurance and preventing micro-raptors, but at the end of the day there is still a gate being built and maintained there.