Open Mobile News
ODK and JavaRosa: Collaborating in Code
A few weeks ago, the Open Data Kit (ODK) team released an update to our mobile client, ODK Collect. ODK is a suite of tools to help organizations collect, aggregate and visualize their data. The goals of ODK are to make open-source and standards-based tools which are easy to try, easy to use, easy to modify, and easy to scale.
Some of the new features in the most recent release include barcode scanning, image/audio/video capture and playback and editing of saved data. We've also made location acquisition and form processing a lot faster, added a really cool way to review data entry and reworked the user interface to make training and use much easier. Of course, we still support question grouping, repeats, constraints, complex logic and multiple languages -- functionality that we inherited from JavaRosa, another Open Mobile Consortium data collection project. (For a video of some of the new features, see here.)
ODK and Java Rosa - The Obstacles to Working Together
The story of how the ODK and JavaRosa projects, two competitors in the mobile data collection space, came to work together is something we would like to share with the wider community. Both of our respective projects faced a number of challenges that illustrate how hard it is to work together to benefit our users. For us, this story demonstrates the importance of the Open Mobile Consortium in creating an organizational and technical framework to minimize the obstacles faced in collaboration.
Lessons in Interoperability
One of OMC's primary goals is to maximize interoperability and data-sharing capabilities among our technologies so that the whole of our collective effort is greater than the sum of the individual parts.
Think of the OMC technologies as a set of Lego-like building blocks that can be snapped together in different ways. It's a great goal in theory, for sure -- but in practice it is more difficult to achieve. There is redundancy, and systems that could and should share data may not. Being open source or championing open standards is necessary -- and we certainly do – but it's not sufficient.
Building the Open Source Mobile "Lego" Pieces for Social Impact
This is a story about progress towards integrating several OMC technologies in Tanzania and some of the lessons we are learning along the way. It illustrates the potential of the OMC ‘Lego’ pieces for mobile for social impact and where we still need to do more work.
Join us for the First Open Mobile Camp!
Join us for Open Mobile Camp, the first camp of the Open Mobile Consortium, on October 24, 2009 in New York City!
Open Source Mobile tools and code, for health, humanitarian relief, and social impact. A camp for developers and implementers with some technical chops, to develop roadmaps, further specific apps and integrations, and bond as the Open Mobile community. Open Mobile Camp is organized by the Open Mobile Consortium, its members, and The Humanitarian Foss Project.
