Hélène Martin TSC Application - 2017-11-27

Name
Hélène Martin (@LN)

Organization
Nafundi

What contributions (e.g., issue triage, tech support, documentation, bug fixes) have you made to the ODK community?
In the past year I have been involved in all aspects of ODK from diving deep into the ODK XForms spec to doing code review to answering support questions. I have been interested in putting more formalized processes for decision making and try to involve others in the community in everything that I do. I have brought new contributors in through programs like Google Summer of Code and Outreachy and through participation at conferences like the Community Leadership Summit and Open Source Bridge.

How do you believe your contributions have benefited ODK?
I have helped make it possible to deliver consistent releases that address community needs. Downloads of tools have gone up significantly since these processes have been in place. Collect is the tool we have the most metrics on -- ratings have gone up and crashes have gone down.

What do you believe the top priorities for ODK are?

  1. Aggregate: longer-term plan, more opportunities for interfacing with other systems
  2. Briefcase: code modernization so it can be more easily and safely improved
  3. Collect/form specs: consolidation and optimization of interaction with data outside the form (external itemsets/pulldata/external secondary instances)
  4. Collect: cleanup and improvement of geo functionality (there's a TON of potential there)
  5. Ecosystem-wide: a better story for form versioning

How will you help the ODK community accomplish those priorities?
Iterating on specification changes, participating in feature scoping and design, writing and reviewing code, writing documentation and evangelizing new features.

How many hours a week can you commit to participating on the TSC?
10+ hours

What other mobile data collection projects, social good projects, or open source projects are you involved with?
I'm an occasional contributor to Eureka, an iOS library for form building (https://eurekacommunity.github.io/). In general, I try to fix issues in open source software I use whenever possible. I support a number of social good projects as part of work with Nafundi. When I can, I volunteer teaching computer science to young women and other represented groups (e.g. Jokkolabs Dakar).

Please share any links to public resources (e.g., resume, blog, Github) that help support your application.

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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 best things.
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 question is with you is

  1. Why you put Briefcase on your second priorities?
  2. What is Ecosystem-wide?

Narendra

Thanks for your questions, @iamnarendrasingh!

Briefcase is an important tool in many users' workflows. It lets people take complete control of their data by doing local backups, by automating tasks through the command-line interface and by pulling directly from clients like Collect. Right now development on it is stalled because the code is brittle and there are several issues related to each other that need fixing (e.g. logging). I think there's the opportunity to help many users by making improvements to Briefcase such as Adding bulk export of data to Briefcase GUI.

ODK includes a set of tools like Aggregate, Briefcase, Collect etc but it also defines standards such as the ODK XForms and ways for the tools to communicate between each other. Many tools such as Enketo or Ona are compatible with ODK without being core tools. They are important parts of the ODK ecosystem.

In this context, I said "Ecosystem-wide" because ideally clients and servers across the ODK ecosystem would allow the same kinds of changes to forms and communicate them in similar ways. Right now some use the version field in forms and some don't and even those that do don't use it consistently! So this is an area where I think the TSC could outline some very useful new standards and guidelines.

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