Organization
Local Self Government Department, Govt. of Kerala, India
What contributions (e.g., issue triage, tech support, documentation, bug fixes) have you made to the ODK community?
ODK Community Accessibility Enhancement
How do you believe your contributions have benefited ODK?
Will improve in more collaboration and localized development and penetration
What do you believe the top priorities for ODK are?
To be FOSS and provide a sustainable technology platform for the betterment of the world
How will you help the ODK community accomplish those priorities?
By Training and Educating the technologies in my country and involving technically sound people in enhancing the functionalities of ODK
How many hours a week can you commit to participating on the TSC?
30
What other mobile data collection projects, social good projects, or open source projects are you involved with?
Just ODK
Please share any links to public resources (e.g., resume, blog, Github) that help support your application.
First of all, I would like to give thanks to all core team who thinks that TSC is must and they call application publicly which is one of the bestthing.
It's good that @yanokwa give name publicly and we, who are a newbie in ODK can see the profile of our TSCs and ask questions with them.
My questions with @mistcrrgpsa are:
What is ODK Community Accessibility Enhancement? Could you give your post's example so we can see your work more on this?
You said that you will give 30Hours in a week for participating in TSC. Sounds awesome. When I gone through with @mistcrrgpsa if this is the only profile of you then I see that you joined ODK Comunity on Nov 05, This is your fifth week and you gave us only 02Hours? Is this fair with us(ODK Newbie) if you want to be our leader you should give answers to us? And you talked only about one question and that is you can see your self https://forum.getodk.org/u/mistcrrgpsa on this link. Could you please justify this?
First of all let me thank my friend for the questions. Pls find my response in line
Q.1
There are many perspective to answer the above of which i am concentrating on major two areas as below
a. ODK Forum is the place of interaction and information dissemination between the ODK members, hence i felt a need to enhance the same to have a localised groupings of members on a geographical basis (nation wise/region wise/state wise). This will really contribute to more collaborative work between members belonging to the same region. We need to understand that majority problems where ODK can provide various solutions are mostly region specific. In such a scenario the community tool for ODK (ODK Forum) should be focused in aligning resources to have a more region wise collaboration along with the current topic wise groupings.
b. In a country like India with a mixed economy, which hosts a population of 1.2Billion(approx)of the total world population of 8 Billion (approx), the extend of reach and knowledge about ODK tools and its advantages currently is feeble. The various issues that exists in the economy and the possible solutions which can be offered by ODK has absolutely no limit of explanation. And moreover a solution offered by ODK in a country like India can be considered as a model to be adopted by,based on the requirements of the developed and underdeveloped economies. In the above circumstances, ODK need to be flourished in all possible domains in India and a region-wise collaborative effort is indeed a mandatory requirement for the same. I am really looking for a symbiotic relationship in this proposal where the country is also benefited with the services of ODK and ODK Community is also benefited with the experiences and learnings gathered over the period of time.
Q.2
To be honest, may be in the ODK Forum portal, what u might have seen may be correct.But i don’t think that contribution to ODK is limited to ODK Forum and if it is so currently then we need to work on to change the same and i feel that these tools and the functionalities have the potential to solve many of the complex issues existing in the present world to make earth a better place to live. My experience with ODK started just in September 2017. Since then i have been trying to understand the functionalities that ODK offered and disseminating the same to my group of co-workers.I should say that there is no limit for imagination in ways that ODK can deliver solutions for the existing issues in the world. Being part of the Local Self Government Department,Govt of Kerala which governs a population of 33 million for the state of Kerala,we realised that ODK Tools has vast potential of use for the betterment of the governance and service delivery by the Government. I initiated the use of ODK Tools in the Thrissur district by GPS based mapping of all the Local Body Institutions of Thrissur district. The pilot project was presented to the Hon.Minister of Local Self Government Department for concurrence and we r expecting the approval soon. In parallel we have started using ODK Tools for various field project monitoring and real-time attendance systems.
Currently of the 1000+ Local Self Government Bodies in Kerala,we have been able to spread the use of ODK Tools in 86+ Local Self Government Bodies in my home district Thrissur under the authority of Office of Deputy Director of Panchayat, Thrissur. ODK Tools are going to be utilised by these bodies for various of there field surveys, plan monitoring and beneficiary identifications services.We are planning the expansion of the project model to other districts and cover the entire 1000+ Local Self Government Bodies in the state of Kerala may be in the next 5-6 months. We need to understand that when this happens u are creating more and more ODK members contributing to ODK Tools. Now all these process involves time and effort which exceeds from what i have mentioned in the application and the same cannot be demonstrated in a place like ODK Forum. Moreover u have to see that once if i am being part of TSC given responsibility,then i don’t feel it difficult to spare the above mentioned time for the betterment of the world community in TSC.
Hope i have justified my inputs and given answers to your questions.