What is the general goal of the feature?
The XLSForm documentation suggests that large media files can be zipped to improve upload/download efficiency. This has been an incredibly useful feature for operating in a bandwidth-constrained environment. The current behavior of ODK Central is to ignore media file names that are not directly matched (e.g. 'sites.csv' will not match 'sites.zip' or 'sites.csv.zip'). However, Aggregate will accept these files and ODK Collect will automatically match the zip file with the original CSV filename in the XML form. It would be nice if ODK Central could implement this behavior.
What are some example use cases for this feature?
We routinely perform household surveys that gather data, then follow up several weeks/months later to understand how interventions have changed the environment. We use geocoordinates and IDs generated in the initial survey to make sure we are going back to the same locations, so we upload a portion of the original dataset as a CSV to pull data from during the follow-up. These CSVs can be in the tens of thousands of lines, and weight 30+MB unzipped. Zipping gets down to under 10MB.
What can you contribute to making this feature a reality?
I'll be a tester! I can also try to contribute code with guidance. It is probably an easier place to start than the publishers issue. 