Introduce yourself here!

ODK brings together people from around the world and across disciplines. Let’s get to know each other a bit better!

Please scroll to the bottom, hit the blue Reply button and introduce yourself. Consider including:

  • Where you are typically based
  • How you got involved with the ODK community (ODK origin stories!)
  • What kinds of ODK projects you have been involved in
  • Your blog/Twitter/GitHub/other way for the community to follow you
  • Some of your favorite things to do outside of data collection!
  • [insert your own fun fact here]

You are encouraged to use a real picture of yourself as your avatar. To change it, click here.

This topic is only for introductions. For anything else, please take a look at the categories!

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Hello, I’m the bot for Open Data Kit! I’m really good at doing things like moving posts around and otherwise making sure that everything runs smoothly on the ODK infrastructure. I’ve been involved in Open Data Kit since about September of last year when I started moving issues from Google Code to GitHub.

I’m based on the Internet and don’t need to sleep so feel free to message me at any time. I’ve done a lot of different tasks for ODK but so far my favorite project has been copying over this issue about a daylight savings bug because it got a lot of comments. :tada:

When I’m not helping with ODK, I like to take long walks on the beach but I don’t get too close to the water because my joints could rust.

You can also find me on GitHub and if you’d like to learn more about how to use Discourse, please click on my picture, click on Message and send me a message with the text @opendatakit-bot start new user. And please introduce yourself down here! :point_down:

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So, hoping this will not be used against me, I live in Trinidad, in the West Indies. Note that I said "West Indies", not Caribbean. The West Indies is a place where people live, small islands that are isolated communities, having been used and abused by Europe, sucked dry and discarded. The Caribbean, on the other hand, is something that exists on tourist brochures, in advertising, and has nothing to do with the daily grind under the hot sun. Just so you know.

As to ODK, I cannot at this moment recall what led me to it, but sometime in April this year, I stumbled across it. Guidance, I suppose. I have been searching for years for a useable mobile data collection platform. This started when I worked for a courier service back in the 80's. Never found one until now. ODK blew my mind.

A mobile platform that you program using Excel? Excel? What? Are you kidding me? And all I have to do, is figure out how to set up a Tomcat server? Well, I'll get right onto that, never mind I've have no idea what Tomcat is.

So, with Yaw Anokwa's help, I got my Tomcat server running and I've built some forms for my wife's restaurant.

But then, one Friday, I woke up with the idea, "Can I put her Spanish hymns on ODK?" You see, she's loves the old Spanish hymns and wants to preserve them in her valley. Which is called Lopinot, BTW. (Where we didn't have internet until I went down to protest 5 years running at the local internet and broadcast authority.)

So, I spent a day working on her hymnal and now she has Spanish hymns on her cellphone.

I know it doesn't seem like much, but it's the start of my plan to take over the world! Absolute world domination, here I come!

So, besides ODK, I work with an open source platform called Odoo. It's out of Belgium, which, despite their horrendous history in the Congo, and despite their never having made any reparations for the devastation they inflicted on that place, have managed to produce a really good piece of software.

The core of Odoo is only about 40K lines of Python code, which, the next time I am in hospital, I thoroughly intend to read through, a perfectly manageable size. It comes with some basic modules, accounting, etc. But the key thing about it, is that you have the source and you can build your own modules.

So, for the past 2 years, I've been working with my brother to write a module to help manage the loans at our credit union. It's been fun, difficult (coz I'm old) but fun.

The screens are all XML, just like ODK!

I've been trying to get Yaw Anokwa interested in Odoo, but he hasn't seen the potential yet. Say what.

The other BIG piece of software in my life, is Twiki. If you don't have a personal wiki, start now. I've been maintaining mine since 2002 and I wish I had started before. Every script, every configuration, every blessed screenshot I ever needed, is in my wiki. Hey, it automatically does version control! So, my young friends of the ODK community, take some free advice from your old buddy, Seth and set up a wiki TODAY! One day, your memory will begin to fade and you will find yourself trying to remember something you shoulda written down but didn't. Then, you will kick yourself and say, "You know, I really shoulda listened to that old fart, Seth."

Fun fact: just came back from Abu Dhabi, the longest journey of my life. It's really hot there. Not joke hot, real hot! They have MILES of water pipe to feed plants. Every plant you see, has a pipe feeding it. They want to grow a forest in the desert.

I stayed in a university, which has a garden filled with tropical plants. Even sugar cane, that blood-soaked weed. Cane needs water, a lot of water. They got it to grow.

The Emiratis are a determined people. They don't play around. I have real respect for their force of will.

Ah! now I remember how I found ODK!

I went to a lecture by Dr Patrick Hosein. He's one of our local unsung geniuses. No really, the guy has 5 degrees from MIT, 40 patents to his name. He's one of the most humble men you will ever find. No setta big talk from him, just straight and simple. He's even kinda shy.

So, on a whim, I went to the lecture, just to support him really coz we've gotten along well in the past, though I've only met him a few times. He hired me to set up a server once. That kinda thing.

Anyhow, he's managed to get the university to offer a Master's degree in Data Science, a new thing for them. He's done lots of research in his career and thinks we need data scientists here.

So, I got inspired by his ideas, did some searching and found ODK. I offered to come on and set up the Tomcat server for him for free, but so far he hasn't bit the hook. World domination takes time.

Also, I got distracted by the Abu Dhabi trip. But now, I'm back. Fell back into writing scripts and such, but this week I've going to start working with ODK again. I want to see if I can get it to talk to Odoo. Might not get it to talk directly but we'll see how far I get.

Seth

25 Likes

Hello world!

I'm a real human who uses the ODK suite as key tools.

I'm based in the Philippines and working on rice research. I got involved in the ODK community when I started working with a project already using ODK tools.

In my spare time, I usually update myself with the newest innovations in the realms of science and technology.

FUN FACT

Did you know that camelCased XLSForm field names will become SNAKE_CASED MySQL table attributes?

When you design an XLSForm and your naming convention for the field names is camelCase, on the back-end part, the generated MySQL table attributes will be rendered upper cased snake_case.

Example

This structure of XLSForm,

+------+-----------+------------+
| type | name      | label      |
+------+-----------+------------+
| text | firstName | First name |
| text | lastName  | Last name  |
+------+-----------+------------+

will become like so in the MySQL database table structure

+------------+--------------+
| Name       | Type         |
+------------+--------------+
| FIRST_NAME | varchar(255) |
| LAST_NAME  | varchar(255) |
+------------+--------------+
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Hello everyone,
I'm from India and have just finished my graduation.
I started contributing to ODK Collect's source code as a newbie to open source community in February. Since then I have been fixing bugs and reporting issues for the app. I will also work on improving the UI/UX of the app in this summer as a part of GSoC programme. Hoping to discuss all the cool ideas for the same in this forum soon.

Shobhit

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Hi, I'm Yaw and you can generally find me online as yanokwa.

I love speed, finesse, and doing things my own way. I also love building and improving: cars, motorcycles, businesses, software, and communities.

I helped to start ODK when I was a Ph.D. student in computer science at the University of Washington in 2008. I've long since graduated, but I continue to work on ODK daily because I'm blown away by the impact the project has had and the community that has grown around it. Case in point, I've sent 4,287 of the 25,747 messages on the ODK mailing lists. For those who don't have a calculator handy, that's 16.65%!

These days, I'm CEO at Nafundi, a distributed company I co-founded that designs, builds, deploys, and supports mobile data collection systems that work well in challenging environments. At Nafundi, we mostly help clients customize and deploy ODK at scale and for social good.

Fun fact: I'm originally from :ghana: Ghana :ghana: and I've lived the longest time in the :us: United States :us:, but I'm not really based anywhere! I live out of a carry-on bag that holds all my possessions and I move every month or so. Over the last three years, I've spent most of my time living all over Central America, South East Asia, Africa, North America, and Europe. I've eaten many things in that time, and I must say, my favorite non-bacon food is mbuzi choma from Kenya. :fire: :goat: :fire:

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Hi, I'm Bunhann from Phnom Penh (Cambodia).
I have been using ODK since 2015 which this tool was introduced by my manager.
You can find me on Twitter: @bunhann.

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Hello World,
I am a technical writer and quality manager at EpiConcept SA, a 55-person French Public Health Information Systems company in Paris, France who principal founders come from MSF. We make custom information systems for regional and national institutes and agencies and international organisations, and have some very mature human resources applications for NGOs. We were delighted in 2012 to add ODK Collect compatibility to our simple on-line community data collection tool Wepi.org. I think the work and approach of the ODK project started at the University of Washington is quite outstanding.

9 Likes

Hi Everyone,
I'm an ecologist from the UK, based at the Open University and working on all sorts of ecological things in this country and elsewhere. I got into ODK completely by chance, looking for tools to improve student data collection in the field. I've developed several small to medium-scale ODK projects myself for field surveys of environmental/ecological systems. The most ambitious is probably an ongoing survey of tropical forest trees for forest carbon assessments, carried out by high school students. I've also run training for students, other scientists and organisations on developing forms and running surveys with ODK.
You can catch me on Twitter: @Om_Phil . Apart from that and research papers I'm pretty anonymous.
Outside of data collection, I teach students, watch wildlife and climb hills.
Fun fact: I once accidentally ordered a delivery of 1000 Weetabix to the middle of the Guyanese rainforest.
Phil

9 Likes

Hi everyone! Michael Downey here from the United States. I've been an ODK fan & supporter for 8 years or so. As a long-time advocate of free & open source software in the international development space, I know just how valuable ODK is to the world. So it's great to see things growing and the launch of this new forum!

Currently, I'm the Director of Community for open source projects with for the Digital Impact Alliance at the United Nations Foundation. We're a new organization, but are eager to do all we can to support ODK and other similar projects. I'm looking forward to being part of the conversations here!

:wave:

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Hi, I am Mukund . I am from India. I have been involved in contributing code to the collect-code module of ODK so far. Favorite things to do is to hit the gym daily and also to code/work on diverse projects. See you around!!

8 Likes

Hi All--

I'm David McCann, typically based in Washington DC, USA! I'm interested in building things: teams, software products, and for the past year, a house (well rebuilding, technically). I got my main start in OSS for development/T4D while living in Uganda image and working for UNICEF on the RapidSMS platform. I've only recently had the opportunity to contribute to the ODK project in my role as Director of Technology for open source at the Digital Impact Alliance, and I look forward to becoming increasingly involved!

9 Likes

Hello! I'm Hélène (pronounced L-N). I've been following ODK with interest since its very beginnings at the University of Washington but I only started being actively involved in late 2016 when I joined Nafundi as CTO. Since then, I've been working on our various consulting projects and trying hard to make it easier for people new to ODK to contribute. One project I'm especially excited about is the Collect User Experience refresh that @Shobhit_Agarwal is working on this summer as part of Google Summer of Code. I'm his mentor but so far I think I've learned more from him than he has learned from me! :rocket:

You can find me on GitHub and Twitter.

I'm French-Canadian🇨🇦 but have been living in the US🇺🇸 for many years. In my off time, I like to eat, travel and sew my own clothes. To combine passions, I work on an app called Cora for keeping track of fabrics. My favorite savanna vegetarian is the warthog. :boar:

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I'm an Associate Research Professor at U Connecticut. I study HIV prevention & treatment in sub-Saharan Africa & use ODK for multiple projects.

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Hello. I am Clint. I've been working on ODK since 2009, as the primary developer and maintainer on Build. Around 400 commits later, somehow the tool is still alive and growing.

If you have any questions about or suggestions for ODK Build, please don't hesitate to reach out! The goal is to make Build as easy and fun to use as possible without sacrificing any core ODK functionality. If we aren't meeting that bar for you, please speak up!

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Hi All! I'm Kate and I'm usually online as wonderchook. Chook is slang for chicken in Australian, so I'm kind of a super hero chicken.

I got interested in ODK when I was Executive Director of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and living in Indonesia. We were looking for better ways to collect data more efficiently in low bandwidth environments. I carried my interest in ODK to my job today as CTO of Cadasta. Cadasta builds technology to help communities document their land rights. We primarily use ODK-Collect as our mobile data collection tool and then upload the data directly into Cadasta's own platform.

I'm based in the US in a little town called Winlock in Washington State. Winlock is probably best known for being home to the World's Largest Egg. I just moved here so I can't take credit for the egg.

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Hi Am Ayoub Kakande, based in Uganda, East Africa.
I have a master's in Enterprise Architecture, been doing data management in HIV research for past 12 years.
currently am using ODK on a number of projects one of which is a CDC project establishing a birth defect surveillance in 4 busy hospitals, midwives capture data in real time for all births 24/7, they use ODK collect, I set up a local server, I have scripts that automatically back up the data every midnight on an external server, I use briefcase CLS to automatically pull data from MYSQL everyday ready to be exported into STATA, where I run QC on a daily basis.
the other project, I use ODK to map patients who need follow up.
I really luv ODK as it has not only made my life easier but the help I get the ODK community is just mwaaaa

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Hi. My name is Sid and I'm a engineering geologist from Sweden.

I have used ODK in various projects to collect field data since 2015. I have also helped with the Swedish translation of ODK Collect.

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Good day all,
Am Bidemi a GIS analyst working with a Utility firm in Nigeria. Am pretty new to programming... so i'll ask for help alot coz am ready to learn. Thanks

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