Fourth post from the ODK Discussion Series. Participate using the link below! ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Matt Berg <mlberg@gmail.com> Date: Sun, 8 Nov 2015 21:00:56 +0300 Subject: The importance of Open Standards. What we learned collaborating on the XLSForm spec To: ODK Community <opendatakit@googlegroups.com> Dear ODK Community, I wanted to contribute on the ODK series about how ODK and working with Gaetano in particular taught our team at Columbia about importance of open standards. First, I apologize this post is a few days late. As many of you may (or might not know), at the foundation of ODK are XForms. XForms are a W3C open standard for representing forms in XML. XForms aren't necessarily simple and they have many limitations, however, they do get a lot right and provided a foundation to build tools like ODK. I wasn't around for the beginning of ODK but one of the things that happened at that time is a group of early ICT4D practitioners including Dimagi, AED, Cell-Life, UW (ODK), U of Oslo (I apologize for any groups I left out!) realized wisely that while mobile data collection was still pretty nascent there was a real risk of fragmentation due to the number of tools that were starting to be developed in parallel. This could lead to a lot of duplicate efforts and wasted resources with different groups trying to solve the same difficult problems in different ways. This could lead to discussions Beta vs. VHS debates, something our space really couldn't afford... Read more at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/opendatakit/z061CM9NVus