These are all concerns that the team at
Open Data Kit (ODK), an open source suite of data collection tools, have fleshed out and iterated upon. ODK was born in 2008 as a Google sabbatical project of University of Washington computer science professor Gaetano Borriello. Borriello wanted to take advantage of Google’s data collection tools: maps, visualization, databases and has said that his team saw a gap in mobile data collection. Thus, Borriello’s team developed ODK Build, ODK Collect, and ODK Aggregate, mobile tools that have attracted thousands of users and dozens of active developers.
As ODK iterates and evolves, the Public Sector Engineering team is learning about the challenges and opportunities in mobile data collection and exploring how we can contribute to this space. ODK already
gives users the option to visualize data in Google Earth and Google Fusion Tables, and we are exploring how to make use of some of Google’s other tools (what if photos collected on the ground could be easily posted to Picasa, or videos to YouTube?) It’s our goal to make sure that all meaningful data is effectively organized and made discoverable, accessible and usable.
Ultimately, community forest monitoring represents just one slice of the potential that effective data collection tools create. ODK was initially motivated by the needs of community health workers and has proven flexible enough to be used to track everything from
human rights violations in the Central African Republic to
water quality in Ghana. As the nature of scientific research diversifies and the volume of data collected increases, reliable, flexible, and lightweight tools will become more and more crucial.
What’s next? As the engineering teams continue to work on improving mobile data collection tools, the working group will convene policymakers at the next workshop to discuss standards and best practices. “The greatest barrier isn’t a technological one, but the challenge of leveraging this data so that communities can help ensure better governance for their forests,” says Niki Mardas, Head of Strategy and Communications for the Global Canopy Programme and
theredddesk.org. As with many other public data collection efforts, it will become the job of advocates and analysts to shape meaningful narratives and press for the change the world needs. We’re glad to be a part of this effort and we’re committed to working with our partners to transform data collection from a passive process to an active and empowering practice.
Posted by Tanya Keen, Google Earth Outreach Team and Jenny Ye, Public Sector Engineering Team
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