Hi Changers, I'll be giving a public seminar at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) this Wednesday (Feb 27th at 4pm) and would love to see all of you in the crowd. The talk will be about collecting data at scale with smart forms on phones and tablets. I'll show how the standard ODK tools have worked at scale and show a few of the new ODK tools that Gaetano and the rest of the UW-CSE team have been building. I will also talk a little bit about the work I've been doing at Nafundi building software for challenging environments. I've provided the abstract and details below. Please come by and ask hard questions! Yaw # Synopsis Open Data Kit (ODK, http://opendatakit.org) replaces paper forms with smart forms on a phone or tablet. ODK is great for mobile field workers (e.g., census enumerators, community health workers, and forest monitors) who need to collect data accurately and report results instantly. The free and open-source ODK platform has tens of thousands of users who use it to measure indicators, track performance, and maximize their impact. Examples include: Kiva: gathering borrower demographics and repayment information The Carter Center: monitoring elections in young democracies The Jane Goodall Institute: documenting the health of forests AMPATH: supporting HIV testing for over half a million people Besides collecting text and numbers, ODK can be used to take pictures, capture GPS locations, scan barcodes, get signatures, and even play videos. Additionally, ODK forms support branching logic, repeating sections, multiple languages, data encryption, and working offline. In this seminar, Yaw Anokwa, one of the designers of ODK, will discuss how his doctoral research on building technology for low-income regions motivated the creation of ODK. He will also describe a few of the ODK tools being used at scale and demonstrate how they enable data collection with smart forms on mobile devices. # Bio Yaw Anokwa first realized the impact technology could have on the world's underserved while deploying a medical record system in Rwanda. That experience inspired his PhD work addressing the limitations of paper-based systems using smart phones and "cloud" servers. Dr. Anokwa founded and runs Nafundi (http://nafundi.com), a technology company with expertise in creating software for challenging environments (e.g., rural Kenya, war-torn Afghanistan, and post-hurricane New Jersey). He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington. A more detailed biography of Dr. Anokwa and his curriculum vitae can be found at http://anokwa.com. # Details Place: 2301 Fifth Ave., Suite 600, Seattle, WA 9812 Date: Wednesday, February 27th, 2013 Time: 4:00 p.m. coffee reception; 4:15 p.m. lecture http://www.healthmetricsandevaluation.org/news-events/seminar/collecting-dat...