The Open Data Kit Project
Waylon Brunette, Carl Hartung · 2021
Abstract This chapter presents the Open Data Kit (ODK) project’s design, challenges, development, and evolution of configurable software frameworks and their international development impacts. The ODK project created a suite of mobile data collection tools designed to help organizations working in resource-constrained contexts collect, aggregate, and analyze data. ODK mobile tools are designed to maintain their functionality in locations with limited, intermittent, or no Internet connectivity. While the first set of ODK tools has experienced wide adoption with millions of users collecting data, its primary use case of unidirectional data flowing from the field to a central repository could not be adapted to certain use cases. To broaden the scope of potential applications, a second generation of tools was developed that added support for bidirectional data management applications. This chapter discusses the iterative research and development process of the ODK project.