How are we doing?

15Aug08

GATHER* is gathering momentum!  We are near completion
of the first field test of the platform in Uganda, and
while we have some small bugs to fix, we are feeling
good about how the system worked. The first use was
to expedite the regular disease surveillance and
reporting system in 20 health centers in Homia district. 

Ugandan health centers are required to report each week on
13 diseases and on other emerging infections suspected,
including polio, rabies, cholera, dysentery, measles, malaria
and other infectious diseases.  The current practices require
the completion of two paper forms that must be taken to the
district or sub-district office, often by foot or by bicycle. 
Reporting delays are common.  This approach is pretty common
in Africa with village and community health centers often in
remote areas without good transportation.

GATHER allowed the health workers to complete their reports
on cell phones and to send that data over the cellular network
to a server at the Ministry of Health. The GATHER server
confirms delivery, sends the data to the appropriate
district office and puts into the legacy database at the
Ministry of Health.   GATHER is designed to alert health
officials when reported numbers are outside of the norm
and may indicate an outbreak.

Recently implemented international health regulations require
UN member countries to report outbreaks on certain infectious
diseases within 24 hours.  GATHER has expedited reporting of
this critical data from rural health settings and has improved
the Ministry’s ability to comply with the regulations and to
quickly respond to outbreaks.

*GATHER is an opensource platform for data collection
and reporting, designed to work with multiple electronic
devices, developed by AED-SATELLIFE and Dimagi.  We are
gathering the best open source elements into the
platform.  Gather applications, gather data, gather
people, gather and share knowledge.  The current phase
of development is supported by a grant from the
Rockefeller Foundation.

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Reporting – Pentaho Tools

30Jun08

Browsing through Pentaho’s downloads section can be a bit intimidating. With such a wide array of products and tools, it’s a little hard at first to figure out the best way to start writing reports. So, I thought I’d post an entry on what I’ve found to be the most useful development environment for creating and editing reports.

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Tags: pentaho, reporting

Developer instructions up on the wiki

04Jun08

Andreas has put up a first pass at instructions for building the GATHER application completely from SVN and other 3rd party installations (will require Maven and Pentaho among others). If you are in the mood for an adventure, try them out and let us know how it goes. We haven’t had a chance yet to verify these on a clean developer machine.

This is a lot like a screencast, but all on the command-line and without any screenshots or voice-over. 

http://code.dimagi.com/Gather/wiki/DeveloperGettingStarted

-Jon

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Packaging the GATHER Appliance

21May08

Ease of use is on everyone’s short list of design goals for everything. Yet, project installation ranges from the elegance of Instiki’s “there is no step three” to the week-long exercise in mind-reading required for many “enterprise” applications. While we’d prefer to package GATHER into a simple executable jar file, having two separate web applications and a database makes that awkward. 

Considering that our deployment scenarios always involve installing a physical server, we decided that our best option was to package GATHER into an appliance using the excellent tools available from rBuilder Online. With rBuilder, we’d have these features:

• JeOS (just enough OS) using a Conary-based system
• Web-based management for system updates
• VMware image, Amazon EC2 AMI, or installable DVD from the same recipe

That last bullet is a killer, allowing us to create a release that is easily installed for testing (using a VMware image), for public access (running on Amazon EC2), or for deployment to a dedicated server.

I’ll walk through the steps of creating a new build of the GATHER appliance. To play along, you’ll need an account on rBuilder Online, and if you’re a GATHER team-member contact me to add your account to the project.

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Tags: ec2, rPath, vmware

Reporting – Getting Started with Pentaho

20May08

In the three-step waltz of gather, transform, report, it’s that third step that gets the accent. Reporting provides the real value of a form capture system. GATHER is concerned with the larger themes and chords that can orchestrate nationwide public health efforts.

So, selecting a reporting framework was our most important decision. After some review (which I’ll get into later) we chose the Pentaho open source business intelligence suite.

Within GATHER, Pentaho exists as a separate web application, integrated by a common data source, some branding, and custom reports. Before working with the GATHER version, it is best to get started with the standalone Pentaho application to really understand what it offers and how it can be used.

Here are the steps I recommend for getting started with Pentaho:

1. Start-up: download, install and run Pentaho
2. Try it out: browse around through the web application
3. Write a report: use the Pentaho Report Design Wizard to write a report
4. Learn more: refer to the official Pentaho documents

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Tags: pentaho, reporting, tutorial

From the Field

19May08

Early in the design process, we acknowledged that the major functional components of GATHER existed in other open source projects. Rather than grow our own, we would focus on bringing together the best solutions available in the field — integration over invention.

The impulse to grow your own, or reinvent the wheel, isn’t just about hubris, however. Sometimes it can just be easier and quicker to make your own rounded spinning thingy than to figure out how to propel someone else’s. Balancing adoption & adaption against original development was and remains our biggest challenge, compounding the usual difficulty of estimating software schedules.

We started with a field survey. Here’s brief summary of what we considered:

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SMS Projects

14May08

SMS will become a supported interface by GATHER in the near future, and we have been speaking with a variety of groups about their SMS projects.  We will be integrating the best of breed tools from a variety of different SMS projects, but wanted to highlight two projects that we just looked at:

1.  A small project some of the Dimagi develolpers created on can be found here:  http://code.dimagi.com/SmsGdata.  It demonstrates the ability to use Google spreadsheets to design a lightweight dataset to be collected and receives an SMS from phones in India.  This was deployed in May 2008.

2.  We just had a great discussion with a technical group at Unicef that we are excited to follow-up with.  They have several interest uses of SMS and a toolkit that looks incredibly powerful http://x.mepemepe.com.  We will hopefully be able to meet with their technical team sometime in May to discuss collaborative oppurtunities.

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Tags: SMS

Possible Logos

24Apr08

Every project more involved than spring cleaning your house deserve a good logo. Here are two options with which I’ve been playing around, the gather(ing) basket, and gather(ed) honeycomb:

Also, given my impulse to use parentheses, here is the possible (product) red edition of the honeycomb:

Reactions? 

 

-Andreas

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gather, transform, report

22Apr08

Conducting a field study is simple: gather data from the field, transform the data into an analyzable format, then produce reports on the data set. Whether conducting environmental impact studies, researching the migration of an endangered species, or monitoring public health, the pattern is consistent: gather, transform, report.

When I had first started working in public health, for SmartCare in Zambia, that pattern was one of many that frequently came up in discussion among the developers. A research project has lots of options for implementing the steps – paper-based, simple database, or enterprise systems.

Jonathan Jackson observed that scaling from paper forms, to a Microsoft Access solution, then on to a custom enterprise solution is always painful. We talked about designing a domain-neutral system that could scale gracefully from a single point solution to a distributed system.

GATHER is our modular framework for providing a scalable solution for data capture and reporting, an integration of the best available open source solutions. The initial implementation will feature:

1. Gather – data capture by mobile clients from the OpenRosa consortium
2. Transform – XForm instance data saved to relational tables
3. Report – integrate Pentaho for pre-designed and ad-hoc reporting

The initial implementation and funding for this effort is through AED-SATELLIFE, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Dimagi. We’re pretty excited to get everything up and running. When we have a software distribution ready, we’ll make announcements here and on the gather mailing list.

Cheers,

Andreas

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