My name is Brent Atkinson. I am currently based in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea and I work for an NGO called Medical Care Development International as a software developer. Mostly, I work on an ODK-based data collection tool supporting malaria control and malaria vaccine projects.
I have a relatively long history working with (and inevitably, on) electronic data collection tools intended to work in challenging environments. The first such tool I worked with (and later, on) was called OpenXData, which is to my knowledge now defunct, which was a mobile data collection tool similar to ODK that worked on extremely under-powered Nokia feature phones. At that time I was working as a developer on a project called Motech. The project, based in Navrongo, Ghana, sought to demonstrate empirically that mobile technology could improve maternal and child health. The technical portion, which took shape after many completed and discarded prototypes, ended up being a custom OpenMRS module that allowed community health care workers to create and manage prenatal care schedules for pregnant mothers by creating mobile forms using the OpenXData mobile client running on extremely low-cost Nokia phones. The system then would notify health care workers and mothers themselves based on their individual care schedule.
Through attempting to leverage existing tools, I was forced to address some overwhelming scale and performance issues out of necessity. As a result, I was invited to work with the existing team in Cape Town, South Africa to integrate my work during an OpenMRS and OpenRosa consortium conference. It was at this conference I met Yaw for the first time. For those not familiar with OpenRosa, it was the umbrella consortium for groups using and supporting standards largely based on the JavaRosa technology, which still serves as the core of ODK Collect today.
Since then, I have been a bit of a wandering developer. I worked as a commercial developer for a while, traveled, attended Hacker School (now Recurse Center) and then was recruited back home to again work on data collection for another health project here in EG.
When not working on my day job, I like to play and build retro games for pico-8, play and watch football (Soccer if you're confused from my silly country 
), and learn about as much as I can about as many things as I can. Oh, and eat spicy food (I love you West Africa!).
A fun fact: while attending Hacker School in Manhattan I developed a tool that helped myself, friends and others attend the final recordings of the Colbert Report after failing to get free tickets through the Comedy Central website and the related "easier" twitter bot, due to increased demand. It was based on a tool called selenium web driver, which is normally used to develop automated tests for web applications. It was a completely frivolous and completely satisfying use of my programming skills! My CS professors would be proud I am sure! 
Oh, and I am batkinson on GitHub.
to everybody involved, especially 
