Work Team / Task Management for ODK Collection

Hi friends- Not sure if this is the right category, but we're trying to work with folks to get a bunch of assets mapped and we'll be contracting out with people throughout DR Congo to help do this. We have a relationship with them, but we'd really love a solution that could include the ability to track the contractor's routes when they are working.

We already use ODK to collect all the information but things are getting a bit complicated now with the number of simultaneous contractors we are using.

I realize ODK may not be a fit for this, but if someone has an idea on what I could couple with ODK, that would be really amazing. I know there are tons of apps out there that do mobile workforce management and previously used Google Maps Coordinate a long time ago, but that project has been discontinued and I'm a bit overwhelmed with the options, especially to work in DR Congo and ideally work with ODK.

Any thoughts, guidance, etc would be greatly appreciated!

Hi @mattcrum, welcome to the forum. When you get a chance, please introduce yourself here.

https://docs.opendatakit.org/form-audit-log/#location-tracking lets you add locations opportunistically in the background during the form filling process. Do you think it'd work for your use-case?

Interesting! Very good to know about this feature which maybe can provide some deeper level of transparency than we have currently, but ultimately a major goal is to be able to pay people fairly as well as increased transparency. So for this collection, we're paying a flat fee for folks to collect this data, but it's not the best solution because if I'm paying someone..say $1 per report submitted via ODK, it's not really fair for folks in more rural areas who have to travel further to map those assets. I cant just rely on road data either because it doesn't actually give a really good representation of travel time (more important than travel distance even) to be completely fair.

Hopefully I'm making sense! :upside_down_face::upside_down_face:

So it sounds like you want to capture travel time outside of the form filling session. Can you describe what your ideal outputs would be (e.g., a GPX file with every location that the phone has been)?

I think the GPX outside of a form filling session would be probably the most important. We could add another app, but what would be really neat is to also use ODK to collect and track expenses that should be on the GPX route, even.. which it sounds like we can already do with the link you posted above.

I'm assuming that the GPX file would have times captured as well which would also be helpful and important.

My implementation of this idea would be

  1. create a separate form with say survey ID which will then be a link to the main survey. So, you could have two tables with Survey ID as primary keys for performing sql join.
  2. The first form would collect data related to the survey and second form collects actual survey data.

That way you can track expenses and time.