Alex Anderson TSC Application - 2017-11-27

Name
Alex Anderson (@alxndrsn)

Organization
Medic Mobile

What contributions (e.g., issue triage, tech support, documentation, bug fixes) have you made to the ODK community?
I've contributed code (cleanup, adding tests, bugfixes, new bugs) to Collect, pyxform, JavaRosa and the ODK XForms spec. I've also helped with code review a couple of times. More regularly, I contribute to Enketo. I also attended the ODK summit in Seattle earlier this year.

How do you believe your contributions have benefited ODK?
I think I've helped improve the code quality in a few instances, added some useful tests to Collect and fixed a few bugs that were...bugging me in the wider toolset. Also I hope I was a net benefit in the discussions at the summit.

What do you believe the top priorities for ODK are?
Provide stable, standards-conformant and free (libre) tools for people working with XForms for data collection.

How will you help the ODK community accomplish those priorities?
Write code, provide guidance on how to maintain or improve quality of code, provide some Android and more general software experience to the community. Provide insight in how the Medic team is using Collect and what our priorities are as an organisation for the future development of the platform.

How many hours a week can you commit to participating on the TSC?
1

What other mobile data collection projects, social good projects, or open source projects are you involved with?
At Medic we work on mobile data collection with Collect, an enketo-based Android app, an STK-based SMS app, and standard text SMS. I've recently consulted on Sigmah, and prior to that worked as a developer at FrontlineSMS. In my current role at Medic I'm also a contributor to Enketo and have made contributions to a number of other open source projects, including pouchdb.

Please share any links to public resources (e.g., resume, blog, Github) that help support your application.

Hi @alxndrsn! Thanks for your application to the TSC. Your testing additions to Collect have been great!

You explicitly called out XForms as a top priority for ODK. It seems to be the glue that holds a lot of technical community together, but it's not a spec that has seen a lot of broad adoption or traction by the tech community at large. Is a concern for you? Are there other standards that you think the community should be considering?

You explicitly called out XForms as a top priority for ODK. It seems to be the glue that holds a lot of technical community together, but it’s not a spec that has seen a lot of broad adoption or traction by the tech community at large. Is a concern for you? Are there other standards that you think the community should be considering?

As ODK uses a fork of the XForms standard, I don't see use of XForms outside of the ODK community as particularly relevant.

On the other hand, the amount of work put into cross-platform support for building and rendering forms, and storing and processing form submissions means that ODK offers a very mature set of tools - well tested (in the field, at least), and generally reliable.

Any decision by ODK to move to a different form definition standard would throw away huge amounts of hard work and the resulting stability. There aren't particular alternative standards that I would recommend ODK consider.

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