Name
Florian Mayer (@Florian_May)
Organization
Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions, Western Australia
What contributions (e.g., issue triage, tech support, documentation, bug fixes) have you made to the ODK community?
On the Forum I've assisted with ODK Central sandbox invites, suggested new features, and shared a few technical wins (e.g. set up ODK Central on Azure/k8s).
On GH, I've contributed issues (mainly to ODK Build and Central), minor PRs, and likely caused many a headache for Issa and Matt. Issa holds the speed record for fixing a bug in ODK Build within 2h while I was holding an ODK workshop to my colleagues.
On transifex, I've started the German translation for ODK Central, which Dieter Menne gracefully completed.
My "claim to fame" is the R package ruODK, which is used in production at DBCA, and has seen its first community uptake.
How do you believe your contributions have benefited ODK?
ruODK connects the ODK ecosystem to R, and thus empowers users to build FOSS data analysis and dissemination pipelines in an automated and reproducible fashion. Going the extra mile through peer-review and association with the rOpenSci community has raised code quality and robustness.
During the ODK Convening 2019 I've contributed our Department's requirements and use cases (especially around longitudinal surveys).
My contributions on the forum have hopefully assisted some ODK community members.
What do you believe the top priorities for ODK are?
- To continue building and supporting its inclusive and international user community.
- To make the technically hard bits accessible to the enthusiastic non-expert user - e.g. server setup and maintenance, also survey design from idea to XForm/XLSForm, as well as analysis (e.g. worked examples in ruODK).
- To find/iterate on a viable funding/governance/branding model.
How will you help the ODK community accomplish those priorities?
Apart from contributing to discussions at TAB, I can contribute to the items above:
- Primarily through maintaining ruODK and supporting its users.
- Formally through contributions to documentation and informally through participation on the forum.
- Above my pay grade, but I wanted to recognize this as a priority for the longevity of ODK.
As a long term mutual benefit of contributing to TAB, I could contribute visibility of the requirements of ODK users in WA Government. Any implemented requirement would be a win for the local ODK users (primarily my employer and the Flatback turtle program). Being on the inside (TAB) would help me to streamline our requirements into actionable items for ODK.
How many hours a week can you commit to participating on the TSC?
2-4 hours per week ongoing, plus some extra time where needed.
What other mobile data collection projects, social good projects, or open source projects are you involved with?
My primary work involves data capture using ODK for the North West Shelf Flatback Turtle Conservation Program, or in short, to capture all turtle data in Western Australia through ODK (and the entire downstream of data warehousing, QA, reporting, dissemination).
Secondarily, I have a steady stream of DBCA colleagues soliciting my advice for mobile data capture. We typically iterate from idea to form design, parking lot data capture and building the analysis within about 2h, which can then be formalised and documented within a few days into an R package, e.g. https://dbca-wa.github.io/rOzCBI/
I am active in the rOpenSci community, and was active in the CKAN community. Claim to fame: reproducible reporting using CKAN & R (https://ckan.org/2015/09/18/pyramids-pipelines-and-a-can-of-sweave-ckan-asia-pacific-meetup/)
Please share any links to public resources (e.g., resume, blog, Github) that help support your application.
- GitHub: https://github.com/florianm/
- ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4269-4242
- ODK and R example https://dbca-wa.github.io/rOzCBI/
- Reproducible reporting in 30 mins https://ckan.org/2015/09/18/pyramids-pipelines-and-a-can-of-sweave-ckan-asia-pacific-meetup/ or in 3 mins but with music https://vimeo.com/132628186