Ona now fully supports HXL
We are really excited to announce that Ona now fully supports the Humanitarian Exchange Language, or HXL. HXL is designed to improve information sharing during a humanitarian crisis by creating a simple way to promote interoperablity of data. It does this through an ingenius approach of coding data through hashmarks (#), similar to Twitter. Part of
What's New in Ona: Release Notes
We’re constantly working to improve Ona, but we’ve overlooked letting the world know what’s been updated. To fix this, we’ve added Release Notes to keep track of updates in each release. We’ll also be sending monthly email summaries to those of you on the mailing list. Here’s the latest summary: Chart Improvements We’ve added a few things
Introducing ona.R - Easily use Ona in R
One of the great things about the R programming language is the thousands of packages users have written to solve problems in areas of data import, data wrangling and data visualization. We’re glad to introduce ona.R, a package that helps you import data from your Ona account into R. This package is a direct fork of Prabhas Pokharel’s awesome formhub.R library. As we work
OpenSRP Nairobi technology sprint, take two!
In mid-March, Ona hosted the second OpenSRP engineering sprint, bringing engineers from around the world to Ona’s Nairobi office. Engineering partners from SID (Indonesia), mPower (Bangladesh), IHS (Pakistan), OpenMRS, ThoughtWorks and Jembi (South Africa) joined the sprint to enhance the user experience and performance of OpenSRP, an mHealth platform that empowers frontline health workers in developing countries to deliver more effective healthcare. Ona is the technology lead
Updates to user permissions in ODK Collect
One of the major new features that we introduced with the release of our new platform last fall is the ability to assign role-based permissions to projects. This had been one of our most requested features from the previous Ona version, and we’re excited to support this now for all users on ona.io. Users can now create projects on Ona and add
Exporting data with labels
A few emails have come in requesting support for questions as headings in data exports. We have heeded your call and are glad to announce this is now possible. When exporting CSV, Excel and CSV Zip files, you can choose whether labels and/or names show up as column headers. Using XLSForm syntax, the label column contains the actual
Writing Python Code to Decide an Election
The long awaited video from Ona’s keynote presentation at PyConZA 2014. A while back Ona was given three weeks to write the software that will tally votes in the Libyan elections and decide who wins and who loses. This is not something we could get wrong. We combined agile development with best practices in testing
Making an Impact with Lean Data
Lean data, or applying lean processes to data collection and use, is an important tool for creating impact in global development programs. It was created as a response costly traditional M&E (monitoring and evaluation) practices that aren’t about the end consumer or user and only applicable to large-scale programs. The core tenet of lean data is focusing
Give your questions the colors they deserve
We’ve just added a small but powerful new feature that gives you more control on how you visualize data on your map. One of the challenges with our maps to date is you could not specify the colors for specific responses to data. Since colors are randomly assigned, it’s very possible to have true show up as
Map Your World and Ona at Geo for Good 2015
This past October I spoke on behalf of Map Your World at the 2015 Geo for Good User Summit. Map Your World empowers youth to explore issues and ideas that matter – like clean drinking water, or food justice – then write surveys, collect data, and create maps to make change in their communities. This amazing project is powered