Hi @aurdipas
Thanks for your questions.
You’re not wrong. My experience is focussed on Scotland and more recently in Ireland - the Republic and the North. I have not worked in England since 1991, so things have changed enough for it not to be relevant. Geographically my work experience is reasonably limited although I used to enjoy visiting lots of places, in the days when that was possible!
I would probably take a slightly oblique view of 'resource-constrained environments' to address your question - I suspect you mean developing countries and/or emergency / disaster response situations. However, another way of looking at this would be that we are a 'micro-business' (2 partners, no staff) and we compete with large consultancies that have much greater resources than we do. I am the tech support (selecting the hardware and software platforms), I design surveys to use in the field, sometimes in collaboration with others more familiar with the give topic, I deploy the surveys (sometimes to teams I manage, sometimes to clients), I collect the data for many projects, I download it and I analyse it. And I have to do this with my limited capabilities, not a huge amount of time whilst fighting my natural inclination to avoid external dependencies (just a wee part of which is related to cost!). And as time has passed, and my confidence in ODK and its stability has increased, I have deployed projects involving clients and colleagues that are built around ODK (please read that as both my confidence in ODK's stability, and ODK's actual stability!). These need to be cost effective, use existing equipment where possible and actually solve a problem, rather than just change the nature of it - so generally I would describe them as 'resource constrained environments'
So whilst I accept that this is a 'special' definition of 'resource-constrained environments', I consider it to be highly relevant to the development and management of ODK. You won’t find me pushing for a feature that is dependent on 5G or Android 14 (or whatever version we’re at), or even iOS. We use second-hand ebay specials (Samsung Galaxy Note 4, because of their good battery life and stylus input for use in the rain (in a waterproof case!), running on Android 6); we don’t have our own server (the subscription model of a cloud solution doesn’t work for us doing short-term projects mostly) so we’ve been experimenting with Google Drive and now Kobotoolbox, but for years it was all manual copy of the ODK directory and Briefcase – which I recently ‘exposed’ in this post: Advice on managing Briefcase storage on my hard drive I was defeated when Aggregate moved away (understandably) from Appspot and totally failed to set up on AWS Aggregate 2.01 on AWS so I’ve got plenty of skeleton’s in the closet.
However, I am coming to realise that it may be a useful perspective too – I hadn’t really thought about it in this way before applying to TAB. Others will be much better placed and capable of contributing to code enhancements or have the authority / influence to help ODK gain traction and popularity. I hope I can offer some insight into how the tools are used in the field and how the features can be adapted to different situations. I think I’ve come across enough ‘difficult’ situations where I’ve had to be creative with ODK, or ask for the boundaries to be pushed and a few ‘fences’ fixed. And also there have been a few features or issues where my interests are marginal to those of the overall ODK ecosystem so they still wait for a solution (or me finding another way).
Your second question relates to simplicity / usability for non-tech savvy folk.
I think that this new feature of ‘synchronising’ blank forms with a server is a good one – but it does depend on you accessing a server, as I’ve mentioned above - so not universally relevant... But that also doesn't cover everything, in my opinion. @mathieubossaert and I have been finding some challenges with offline maps - Button to select an offline map file on the phone and move it at the right place. And the new ‘here be dragons’ nature of the ODK directory (thanks to Google) only makes things worse.
As an example, I was on the side of the mountain with a path builder the other week. He’s a highly skilled craftsman but has very little tolerance of technology that is not intuitive. I needed him to load a .mbtiles file on his phone so he could see the survey data for the path he is building when recording a geopoint (related to monitoring progress) – he had failed to download the .mbtiles file before going on site because he doesn’t have a laptop to plug in. He didn’t have a decent file manager app on the phone, and found it difficult to follow my instructions that were given from 2m away (think physical distancing, Covid-19) but that would normally be 120 miles away from my office... So I got the hand gel out, disinfected his phone and then tried to send it with Bluetooth from my phone, but I didn’t find a way of getting Android to recognise the file and move it to the right place on his phone. These are the kind of problems I am working with – they are frustratingly simple at times, but make the difference between success and embarrassment. On another project this week, with a different recording protocol, I managed to talk someone through the process of getting a map layer onto their phone - a mix of email instructions and talking them through it - it was successful, but not easy.
So working within TAB would mean I bring some weird experiences that might have some relevance to other situations, and I'd need to leave my own ‘interests’ at the door to look for the most creative common good / best solution with the resources available – because that’s how I approach life.