Remote Data Collection and Monitoring

This guest post was written by Linda Raftree who is using social media and ICTs in youth and community development work in Africa and elsewhere. She works for the NGO Plan.  Her article is re-posted here with permission.

As we are getting ready for our event in Washington DC tomorrow that will focus on New Tools for Better Elections, we are excited to see that more open source options for mobile data collection and analysys are becoming available than ever sbefore.  Development Seed, one of the most promising Drupal development shops around right now, has been an innovator in developing platforms for data analysis, in particular.

This article describes the latest release of its open-source platform Managing News, and its integration with a low-cost SMS gateway for mobile data collection.

A research group at the University of Washington has done what few others manage – turn a research project into a real-world application. Open Data Kit (ODK) is a collection of tools that allows organizations to collect and send data using mobile phones. The system, in operation for about a year, has already been used for projects such as counseling and testing HIV patients in Kenya to monitoring forests in the Brazilian Amazon.  
What is ODK?
The project began when University of Washington (UW) professor Gaetano Borriello began a sabbatical at Google to build a mobile data collection system.

In South Africa, national unemployment stands at 24% – and that number is even higher in many areas outside of major cities. Mobenzi, a new tool created by South African company Clyral, is a project to target unemployed workers to allow them to work over their mobile phones. “Mobenzi agents” use mobile phones to complete tasks that are difficult for computers to process.