Hi There! I'm new to ODK. I'm a researcher in the social sciences and looking to make the switch from pen and paper to digital. I've heard great things about ODK so giving it a try. Thanks!
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Hi there,
I'm Souirji Abdelghani, a Belgian national holding an engineering and PhD degrees in agronomy and soils. I have been working in rural development in 16 countries in Asia and Africa since 1978. I have worked in government and private rural development organizations and 11 years as FAO expert and project manager. I am now 'retired' but continue to give a hand to some NGOs mostly in Ethiopia and Senegal.
I often have to help partners design/conduct household surveys and started using ODK for that about 18 months ago. I only use ODK Collect, ODK Build Offline, ODK Briefcase and Nafundi's excellent XLSFORM offline in my workflow because it is rare to find reliable and affordable Internet connections in rural areas of the developing world.
ODK is such a marvelous set of tools that I have become addicted to it! Although I've been writing software using MS Visual Basic.NET since 2003, I have started learning Java and the Android platform to give a hand in the development of ODK tools.
I am also a fan and a heavy user of QGIS to which I wish also to contribute.
So my retirement program is mostly being involved in ODK and QGIS.... Sorry, I forgot to add that I also like taking care of my wonderful family (Wife, 3 children, 2 grand-children ... so far).
I also like nature, gardening and sea-fishing.
Congratulations to ODK team for the nice work and to this wonderful community.
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Hi, I am Maurice recent graduate from Georgetown University. I work at DIAL at the UN Foundation. I live in Washington, DC and I am originally from Rwanda. I am interested in writing a case study on ODK particularly from the end-user perspective. Hope to learn from this forum/ you all.
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Hi Everyone!
I am based out of Nairobi, Kenya, presently serving as the Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) Manager for Mercy Corps' East and Southern Africa regional office, since January, 2017.
I first interacted with the ODK platform and community in 2015 while in my previous similar role with the African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF). I participated in a hackathon sponsored by the Gates Foundation and hosted by the NAFUNDI team, which led to a partnership between AATF and NAFUNDI, who helped us in setting up, training and piloting the use of ODK across our various projects (Thanks to @yanokwa)
In my current role, I advise and support several of our programs in the region, on the use of ODK and other ODK-based platforms (ONA, TAROWORKS etc) as the main data collection tools within our M&E system(s).
In my spare time, I am an avid traveler and mentor for under-privileged children from Nairobi's slum areas, who I support through sponsorship of a local junior soccer academy.
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Hello everyone
I'm Jean Christian Kouontchou Mimbe.
I'm Data Manager in World Health Organization, Cameroon office. I'm based in Yaoundé.
I got the pleasure to work with Yaw on our GIS project in Cameroon where a set of geolocation point was to be collected (thank Yaw for you support). ODK took a growing place in our data collection system so far and it is pleasure for me to be part of this forum. Hope ODK will continue is great job in the area of data collection and that this forum will allow me to solve some problem I sometimes have.
I can present myself as a final user of ODK.
(I'm most french speaker than English. So do not be suprised of mistakes (haha). I'm still working to improve my english).
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Hi all!
Very much looking forward to the conference, and to finally meeting some of the great ODK community.
I'm Calum, I focus on Monitoring, Learning and Evaluation and am based in London although principally work on projects across Sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia. I got involved with ODK as one of our clients wanted to conduct tablet-based data collection across West Africa, but they did not have the budget to commit to paid-for solutions. They also had no in-house capacity to build or roll-out such tools. We built some survey tools (including incorporating encryption), and linked to their existing servers. I'm also working on visualisation of ODK data - both live (through FusionTables etc) and also through wider data analysis using Stata etc. I'd like to develop my R skills, too.
I'm on Twitter @CalumAH - and always looking to see more ODK/data topics in my feed.
Calum
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Hello everybody!
I'm Shawn Sarwar. I'm currently the Sr. Consultant for GHI at eHealth Africa. We use or have used most of major constituents of the ODK ecosystem for various project implementations. Before eHA, I was the technical director at VaxTrac, where we used CommCareODK as part of our stack for childhood immunization tracking using biometric identifiers. These days I do less programming and more systems architecture, although on occasion I'll still put together a functional PoC to make a point. I'm glad to be part of the community and very much looking forward to seeing the collective vision for ODK!
--Shawn
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Hello everyone,
This is Vishesh from India. I was working for a startup till last month.
I got to know about ODK when I was just randomly exploring github one day and I realised there is so much that I can contribute to (especially to collect, since I can code fairly well in Android). You can find me on Github at https://github.com/VisheshVadhera.
I love listening to Heavy Metal Music in my spare time and also am an ardent follower of Arsenal Football Club.
Fun Fact: I belong to 18-35 % of the world population that has a condition called Photic Sneeze Reflex which means that I am unable to control my sneeze while looking directly at sun!
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Hello everyone,
I'm Ben and I work for the Eliminate Dengue Program.
Our software & data team consists of software developers, GIS and data specialists. I come from a design and software product development background. The team is based in Melbourne, Australia, which is far away from most things, including other parts of Australia.
We began using ODK in 2016 and it has been a very valuable part of our toolkit since then. One of our team members had used it in a previous project and recommended it, so we trialled it (successfully) in a project site and have been using ODK 2 since then.
The team at UW have provided a lot of great support for us, and I'm really looking forward to the discussions on the next steps for ODK.
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Hi everyone!! I am Turry, a researcher typically based in Kenya.
Having worked with several other mobile data collection applications, I got hooked to ODK since it offers an aggregation platform, can be integrated with other applications and offers a vibrant community that helps new users share their experiences and get quick solutions.
Since then many opportunities have arisen where I have worked on different projects primarily in data collection and management using ODK. I also have to say I was very happy to find a lot of research output on ODK online when I was writing my thesis.
I am here to learn more.
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Hey ODK community, My name is Nicholas, I am an IT specialist in Kenya, it is my first time to work with an organisation specifically dealing with massive data collection management and analysis, I must say i have found ODK to be very fit, friendly and also acknowledge i got a lot of help from the forums.
I was comparing most current types of data collection and i settled on ODK because of its Usability, user friendly and simplicity principles with ability to visualize data and automatic database creation.
Lets unite to help one another and also improve the data collection tool.
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Hello buddies,
My name is Karanja Kelvin from Nairobi Kenya. Graduate in Applied Statistics with Computing from Maasai Mara University still here in Kenya. Am a statistician and field data collection personnel with KIPPRA (Kenya Public Policy Research and Analysis) working on demand. I also help learners and organizations in designing surveys, collecting, organizing and analyzing data.
A friend introduced me to ODK while working with RSA (Research Solutions Africa) on a project where I was involved in scripting some translations. I had never worked with ODK before but I really enjoyed it. I have scripted several other surveys and wow! I have learnt too much in very little time.. its really working out.. I wish I could get more scripts to make.
Interested in researching in Africa and more so Kenya? It will be my pleasure to work with you. Reach me on email @ karanjawmb@gmail.com twitter @mantiki2
@yanokwa we share this favorite African 'particularly Kenyan' dish!
I like touring .. just time n resources limit me.. have been to Uganda (Balala, Kabale, Kisoro) Rwanda - Just a small country- toured partially everywhere but enjoyed Kivu Beach more:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:, DRC but only at Goma. N will be coming where you are if you invite me:blush:
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Hi all,
I'm Ara, currently an MSc Computer Science student at the University of Southampton in the UK. My previous life includes being a Backend (web) developer at a large regional website in the MENA region and an Android/Blackberry developer for a short period.
Right now I'm looking in to using ODK as a platform on which I can test some prediction algorithms and get telemetry back from it, a project on which i'll be writing my dissertation - this is all work in progress so let's see how it goes 
Ara
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Hello everyone,
My name is Michał (Michael in English) and I am based in Gdańsk, Poland. I am developer at SolDevelo with 6 years of professional experience. For last few years, I have been working mostly on TaroWorks which is based on ODK Collect. Besides Java, I am familiar (at different levels:)) with other programming languages and technologies like C, JavaScript, Ruby, Dart or React Native.
So far I have only contributed to JavaRosa repository. Hope I will be able to help more.
Fun facts: together with my wife we are owners of three dogs: two mongrels from a shelter and one doberman
Hobbies: football (the real one, European :)), bicycle, horseback riding (although I have not had time recently :(), games (video and board)
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My name is Lisa. I live in Kenya. Where i work we do alot to Research. We would like to do most of our data collection using Applications. ODK has been arounmd we have used it a copule of times.
We want to have our local instance of ODK on our sites.Most interested to learn more about ODK
Lisa
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Hi! I'm Sarah Pfeil and I am a medical student typically based in California.
I was originally introduced to ODK while working at a children's hospital on a large NIH funded grant studying infectious arboviruses in Kenya. We were using the platform to census communities in rural Kenya offline. We used these demographic data to link with the blood work we were doing and were able to also geographically map seropositivity of certain infections.
I am currently in Mozambique using ODK to administer surveys to university students to better understand their HIV knowledge with the ultimate goal of developing appropriate testing and education programs around HIV targeted towards the younger population.
I am not a programmer, and am just teaching myself to make simple forms... So, I do not have a GitHub to follow. However, you can follow my research and travels in Mozambique here: https://ucsdsomghac.wordpress.com/about/
Outside of data collection, I love travel, camping, and dancing.
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Hello all, I am an Australian volunteer working in Tanzania with Haki Madini - a small NGO working on human and legal rights issues associated with the rapidly expanding mining industry.
Haki Madini works with about 60 voluntary 'para-legals', local community leaders living in mining areas who are currently being trained in monitoring human rights incidents using a 'check list' format. One of our current projects aims to collate this data and publish an annual status report on human rights violations in the Tanzanian mining sector.
As part of this project we plan to create a real time interactive map, similar to the Child Rights Violation Monitoring system created for Kenya by Ermis Africa.
We have identified ODK as clearly the best platform to build this project. I am hoping that forum members may be able to offer some assistance.
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Buenas tardes mi nombre es jonnathan chaves, me desempeño como ingeniero en sistemas, hace poco conoci de ODK y actualmente diseño cuestionarios en ODK collect,
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Hi ODK Forum,
I am looking to build data logging forms for a marine mammal project in Scotland and app was suggested to me by research partners.
I do not have any experience with ODK and looking forward to learning but expect that will need a bit of help from more experienced users.
If anyone on here is ever in Scotland and would like to help with our not-for-profit marine mammal project, please get in touch
Slainte
Dave
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Hi @porpoise, as someone who began ODK with limited experience, let me tell you it can be done (and can even be fun!). Start small (< 10 questions), test often, search the forum, and ask questions. This forum has a wealth of information, so search through it form all sorts of examples and stories of where other people got it right (and wrong).
Also, nice job! You are the 100th person to introduce themselves!
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