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.