The Open Mobile Consortium is pleased to announce today that Open Data Kit is joining its growing line-up of organizations.

Open Data Kit (ODK) is a suite of open-source tools to help organizations collect, aggregate and visualize complex data. Examples of these tools include ODK Collect, a powerful phone-based replacement for paper forms, and ODK Aggregate, a scalable online repository for collected data.

Among ODK's users is AMPATH, the largest HIV treatment program in sub-Saharan Africa, and Kenya's most comprehensive initiative to combat the disease. Over the next two years, ODK Collect will be used to conduct a home-based testing and counseling program reaching 2 million people.

ODK’s efforts exemplify the interoperability and code reuse that Open Mobile Consortium aims to achieve by bringing together diverse organizations building open source mobile solutions. For example, although ODK Collect is designed for Android phones, it leverages the OMC's JavaRosa project to ensure that forms designed for JavaRosa work with ODK tools.  ODK Collect also allows GPS location, barcode scans, photos, and video added to forms -- a powerful mix that enables an entirely new class of data collection.

Robert Kirkpatrick, chairman of the Open Mobile Consortium says:

"We are excited to welcome ODK as a member of the Open Mobile Consortium. We believe that the Open Data Kit will have opportunities for field use far sooner than many expected. The arrival of Android in India, for example, indicates that ODK’s strategic decision to adopt these cutting edge software technologies both on mobile devices and in the cloud is prescient.

In the meantime, a number of OMC members have already begun exploring possibilities for integration between ODK and their respective tools. ODK is yet another clear indication that the new generation of data collection tools is beginning to hit its stride in terms of power, portability, and ease of use, to the point that we may soon see relief and development practitioners consider abandoning paper en masse."

Yaw Anokwa, one of the developers of Open Data Kit, notes,

"We want our users to choose individual technologies that are appropriate for their organizations and be confident that it will all work together. Open source and open standards are important, but we are also building an open community that makes the tools easy to try, easy to use, easy to modify and easy to scale. ODK helps organizations rid themselves of the problems of expensive and error-prone paper-based data collection.

ODK's developers are members of the University of Washington's Department of Computer Science and Engineering and are generously funded by Google. The project's demo videos, source code, current roadmap and current deployments are all online.

The Open Mobile Consortium's open source software tools help organizations to better serve the health, humanitarian and development needs of the “bottom billion,” the poorest and most disenfranchised citizens of the world. It is an unprecedented collaboration across organizations to better serve communities with open source mobile tools. Together, they are building a vibrant set of platforms for use, at no cost, with no restrictions.

OMC members share a vision that by working together to drive grassroots mobile technology innovation in some of the most challenging, resource-poor environments in the world, they will create a simple, flexible, and reliable set of technology that enable to individual and organizations anywhere in the world to effect social change.

With almost 280 million subscribers in Africa alone, mobile phones are recognized as instruments of change in finance, agriculture, media and development work. Mobile technology can easily provide data on food prices to farmers, patient information to remote medical clinics, and help track supplies and logistics. It is estimated that by 2010, 1 in 3 Africans will own a mobile phone.

The Open Mobile Consortium was founded to develop and bring to scale free and open-source solutions that leverage the power and ubiquity of mobile phones.