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
Ona Data Projects
This post will tell you everything you need to know about creating, sharing, managing, and getting the most out of your projects in Ona. What is a project? In Ona, a project is where your related forms and data are stored. Projects can hold as many forms and data as your plan allows. When you first log in to
Announcing Ona Data 2
We launched Ona 2 today! In our previous announcements here, here, and on our release log, we described the new features in Ona 2. There’s also a Getting Started guide that will show you, well, how to get started, and what has changed from the previous version of Ona. If you have questions on the transition, please email support@ona.io. To celebrate the launch,
Next Up Roadmap
Since it’s always good to know what’s coming up, here are a few new features you should look out for on beta.ona.io in the next few weeks. Improved charts Summary charts will be embeddable, made persistent, and slightly customized. This will allow you to change a chart’s title, as well as generate code to embed it on
Making Ona reliable and resilient
Last year, we experienced a few small periods of downtime. We made changes to bring this up to 99.8% API uptime in 2015. However, the remaining 0.2% bothered our engineering team, so after additional work, we recently hit a rewarding milestone: 30+ days of 100% uptime on our API and front-end site! The first big
Open Street Map as a global "check-in" service
Getting more out of Open Street Maps? At Ona, we’ve always been big fans Open Street Maps (OSM). What’s always bugged me is I felt (like many groups), we’ve failed to fully understand and leverage the incredible wealth of data that OSM represents. Sure, our basemaps are powered with OSM data. And yes, we encourage partners
KLL Humanitarian Quake Map now available as basemap in Ona
Source: Remembering the Lost – Map of Stolen Sculptures from Nepal The Nepal earthquake has shown how important open map data from Open Street Maps (OSM) can be in a humanitarian crisis of this magnitude. Our friends at Kathmandu Living Labs and MapBox worked together to develop a print friendly map that highlights key infrastructure, critical after an earthquake, like