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Proposed by: google.org
Contact (name, email, phone, skype): Steve Hakusa shakusa@google.com
Best way and times to contact during RHoK 2.0 Dec 4/5 2010: email
Upcoming low-cost tablets could revolutionize the process of on-the-ground assessments and other types of in-the-field data collection. Create an easy-to-use, “have to try hard to break it” data collection app for a tablet.
The google.org Crisis Response team has heard numerous accounts in Haiti of the need for a better way to perform assessments that allows for automated GPS entry, performs immediate data validation, and enables rapid transmission of data. Such a tool would allow for more frequent assessments and improve the common operating picture of a disaster. Smartphones may not be the answer; many assessments have dozens, sometimes hundreds, of questions, which would be time-consuming and tedious to fill out on the phone's small screen.
The system should be open-source and support standard, open formats.
A good place to start might be to help improve ODK Collect from the Open Data Kit to work well with the tablet form factor. The upcoming release of ODK will contain a number of new features to support tablets (question groups, multiple questions per screen), but there's still a number of improvements that can be made in the timeframe of RHoK.
- With more screen real-estate, it now makes more sense to have new question types:
These would be excellent additions to ODK.
(Note this list is far from complete.)
http://code.google.com/p/opendatakit
There are also a number of other RHoK projects looking to improve, aggregation, and visualization tools to support additional formats. The goal of this hack is to focus on and improve the core software that could then be used by other specific projects.
ODK is maintained by a dedicated team at the University of Washington and has dozens of deployments worldwide. See http://opendatakit.org/ for more details. Accepted feature enhancements will be included in future releases of the software.