Hello World!
I am Newton Nyapwere from Zimbabwe. I am a GIS Developer. Been using ODK for agriculture, health and environmental data collection. Currently, am developing a form for recruitment and registration of pregnant women at health facilities that automatically calculates estimated date of delivery, number of WHO recommended antenatal visits (ANC) visits, the required ANC visit dates and required monthly savings for transport for ANC and delivery.
I love to play with the mud in the wilderness and classifying landscapes as I have spend much of my career as a Soil Scientist which later transitioned to GIS. I am a drone enthusiast. The drone is my companion in the wilderness.
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Hey world! I'm Braton just learning about ODK mainly for a project and to gain skills.
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I'm Samedi Amba, a developer from Tanzania. While pursuing a living, I have often found myself required to build an offline data collection system. I recently came across KoboCollect, the now ODK, I must say the future to this tool is amazing.
I'm still relatively new, but I believe I will be up to speed, given that data is the pillar of our information age.
Deploying this to one of the government ministries in our country, and I believe that the lessons learnt and the handholding accorded will take me a long way.
I'm a vegeterian, so I won't talk about food for now...
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Hi! I'm César Argul from Spain. I'm a GIS developer and now working on the generation of cadastral surveys with ODK.
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Hello everybody!
I am Paolo Cherubini from Italy. I have already used ODK several times for data collection campaigns in East Africa and Central America, with great satisfaction! I think there are still many potentialities to this tool left for me to know and exploit.
Hope I will be able to give back to the community in the future
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Hi everyone,
What a huge collection of amazing people. I hope I am worthy of your company.
My name is Greg Cullen. I work at The Fred Hollows Foundation. We are a global organisation that seeks to eliminate avoidable blindness throughout the world. We advocate for the rights of indigenous Australians. I've been with The Foundation for over 15 years now.
The Foundation has asked me to trial ODK to collect data so we can research the efficiency rates of our Programs in the many countries in which we and our partners work.
Personally, I believe we are on this planet to help each other. My wife and I regularly volunteer for various community organisations. I'm an Age Manager for Nippers (Junior Surf Life Savers).
Okay, well I've bored you enough. I'm going to roll up my sleeves and take this baby for a spin.
Cheers mates.
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Hi guys!
We are an Italian association, and want to set up a georeferenced website, where put geospaztial informations about environment, health, food, pollution, electromagnetic smog, etc..
In this moment we have activated geonode.3x1t.org (geonode based) where we have published a series of surveys of electrosmog mainly by telephone towers, all works fine but we are thinking to migrate or alongside uMap, basically because we are of the opinion that it can be easier to maintain and manage also at the user level. Geonode for his part has several interesting things very "community oriented" and this too is a remarkable tool.
In particular, we have found that people are very sensitive to environmental issues, but they are much more lazy (than sensitive) too and are not willing to collect data if this is not very very very easy to do (this is why Google is so successful in collecting all our data, and why we have facilitated it, precisely because very often OpenSource developers think as engineers and not as end users...). So we are oriented to find/develop a simple Android app, interface to ODK Collect, where the end user could produce your own measurements/surveys.
We will see what will happen, most likely we will see the Martians first of the realization of this hope, I hope at least I made you laugh 
Davide
Italy
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Hi
I am Ali Iqbal, an Electronics Engineer by education, from Pakistan. I work for a Solar Energy Solution provider company. We undertake public sector projects and install Solar Energy Systems in Buildings, Solar Street Lights and Solar Water Pumping Machinery. For our work on sites, we used to:
- Use paper forms to fill data in on site.
- Physically send in those forms to the head office
- A data entry guy would fill in the excel sheet
- Take pictures from mobile phones on site
- Send in those pictures via google drive or whatsapp
- transfer those pictures to computer and make a folder for that particular site
- Make Pdf reports using that excel sheet and the relevant pictures.
Managing all that was fine when the workload and our manpower numbers were low and our operations weren't that extensive. I was expecting need for offline data collection in the company i work for a couple of years ago. I inquired about a software developer to make a system in house and did a survey of available commercial applications. A friend recommended ODK. At the time my skill set wasn't up to the mark to understand what how ODK worked as i am not a software engineer.
A couple of years down the road, in the present, the push for Solar Energy System installations has surged owing to increased public spending by the Government here. We have received projects that requires installation of these systems in thousands of establishments throughout the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. To manage data collection (site surveys and final installation reports) from far flung remote areas by our site engineers, I have been successfully using ODK central server deployed on a digital ocean instance. The easy to use API allowed me to write scripts that selectively downloads media from the server for further processing.
The headache of managing data has been reduced and our staff can focus of the installations while the data sorting and reporting gets taken care of digitally. ODK has allowed us to streamline our data collection process and automate site reports generation for our clients for which i am really thankful for this community.
Since this is the first project in which we've been using ODK, I have noticed a few shortcomings that would be great if addressed.
- Sometimes a form is incorrectly filled and submitted. It'd be great if an option of editing/deleting submissions was available from the API as managing that on the downloaded data is a hassle.
- A few of our field staff use iPhones (Second hand iPhones are as affordable as low end android phones here). An ODK collect like app for ios that works with central will be great.
I intend to learn the ODK system further for my software development journey and help with my work here.
Best Wishes to all those involved in this amazing project that has impacted us so positively.
Ali
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Hi there! Great to read about your ODK experience!!! great post!!
about the need you have to use ODK on iphone, did you try something like an emulator? please read about it here https://www.iskysoft.com/phone-transfer/how-to-get-android-apps-on-iphone.html
Happy new year!!!
Angelo
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Hi Angelo
Thanks for the tip. I'll check it out
Happy new year!
Ali
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Cordial saludo para todos...!!
Soy carlos Arroyave, ingeniero agropecuario, resido en Colombia Departamento de Antioquia.
Me gustaría aprender a diseñar formularios mas complejos que se adapten a la necesidad real de la situacion
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Hola Carlos, ¿que tal?
ODK es una herramienta bastante fácil de aprender a usar. Puedes seguir la documentación (en ingles) https://docs.getodk.org/ pero, montando una extensión de google puedes usar una extensión de google chrome para traducir las páginas como esta que encuentras
aqui
Otra opción es la de empezar usando herramientas como kobotool https://www.kobotoolbox.org/, que te permite de crear graficamente el formulario que luego puedes seguir usando en kobotool o puedes descargarlo en XLS para estudiar como ha sido creado y XML para usarlo con la app collect de odk.
Un consejo que te doy es descargarlo en XLS y estudiar como ha sido estructurado, los tipos de datos, los controles de validez etc etc... comparandolo con la documentación de ODK, y verás que aprenderás
En este video ( de la uni de Antioquia 
que suerte ) puedes ver como usar kobotool... una vez que manejará mejor el tema, verás que empezarás a crear formularios directamente en XLS.
Un saludo, felices fiestas
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Hello Everyone,
Firstly thanks for the wonderful ODK Ecosystem. I am a Software Engineer who later started his own Software Company with the name - Velocity Software Solutions Pvt. Ltd. I have been working with ODK for quite some time and found it to be very useful.
As a team we are working on solving some of the challenges related to ODK which have been put forward by our clients with major ones being -
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Follow up visits tracking in the forms (This is very critical in India and the Govt always runs follow up tracking programs)
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Automatic reporting system (something on the lines of uReport where the users may choose the questions and get a standard chart created automatically. We have already done the integration with both - ODK and RapidPro and are working on making the application live for the other users. It is simply a layer above ODK, we are not changing any code on ODK)
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Custom Branding of the ODK Collect App so that Enumerators do not get confused and separate identification for each program/project. This is one the major demands because the Govt always wants to launch a project and if personalized branding is not there then the project does not get approved
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Push Notifications in the ODK Collect App to communicate the messages to the Enumerators.
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Extending ODK app to have Training modules with tracking of training of the Enumerators.
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Ability to review and edit the data at the Manager level (I know ODK, by design, does not allow this, this is why we are using some hacks to get this working. We do not intend to change the ODK Central Server or ODK Aggregate Server code as it would make it extremely difficult for the clients to be able to upgrade in the future)
-
Last one is to build a ODK Collect version for iOS (haven't looked into it yet).
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Hello, my name is Sarah and I live in Southern California. I ride a lot of horses and my hobby is data. I was out on Medium reading various topics when I came across an article about taking data collection offline with ODK and Mapbox. This changed the course of my development for an app I have in the works for fire evacuation of large animals in Southern California. Looking forward to 2021 and learning all I can about the ODK ecosystem.
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Hi, I'm Fredy Angarita,
Sorry I do not speak English well.
I live in Colombia, I am a forestry engineer, I work as a contractor, I travel a lot and my work is within the forests of my country.
I am in the ODK community, because I am interested in automating processes in my work, in addition, I want to learn how to create forms for all the topics that interest me, because I like mathematical logic.
I am in a personal project, where I want to automate the data collection in the forest, to facilitate my work, also, I like it, I am new to this, I am learning daily.
I like Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, in addition, I like to enter the forests of my country, because they have great plant diversity.
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Hi! I'm Dominic, a full stack programmer looking to learn more about the ODK platform and perhaps contribute to its development.
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My name is Fredrick Wanjohi am 43 years old married with 3 children . ODK is a new app to use and looks interesting. I hope to learn more.
.
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Hello everyone
My name is Naomi. My main area of specialization is GIS. From time to time (in the past 4 years) I have used ODK in designing forms mostly for humanitarian data collection (I love doing humanitarian work). I am excited to be part of such a passionate group and I hope to support others where I can and also better my skills. I have also been developing my skills in R.
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Hello Everyone!!
My name is Danny, am based in Beirut - Lebanon, I got involved in the ODK community when I joined united nation, they are already working multiple projects using ODK aggregate
We collect data to identify and help poor people to implement a safety net for the community
you cant reach me on twitter @danny777lr
Danny
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Hello world!
This is Yann, French national currently based in Kigali as director of engineering for the non-profit One Acre Fund, whose mission is to improve East-African agricultural production by facilitating access to better inputs and credit.
Trying out ODK to see if this might fit some of our field staff in their interactions with our local farmers!
One of the things I've been trying to do is run ODK in a kubernetes cluster for simpler cloud-native operations... working reasonably well so far.
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