Hi all, Group Complete, a collaborative & real-time mobile data collection solution and the Group Inform app for Android, are now in open beta. We're inviting the Couch community to experiment with us during this time. Our work is based on Open Data Kit and CouchDB.
For those not familiar with mobile data collection, Group Complete allows for the capture of structured information using interactive XForms, which are not entirely unlike their paper form counterparts. XML is used to define and store responses to the questions that are asked, their logical order and other parameters Captured data includes everything from free-form text input and select lists to barcodes, GPS, audio, pictures and video. The Group Inform app expands upon the great data collection features found in ODK Collect. It is backwards compatible with ODK Aggregate. Features include: * Management of mobile devices involved in data collection (account owners only) * Build and edit XForms on the fly using the built-in form editor (we're working to make Group Inform truly mobile, from form creation to data entry, export and visualization) * Share forms and data with other team members using shared folders (we call this Simple Sharing) -- this means that mobile workers are no longer islands to themselves and can benefit from collaborative data collection * Work with forms and data offline; changes to forms & data in "synchronized folders" are automatically replicated back to master copies (this is the beauty of CouchDB at work) We are currently supporting Android 2.2 with added support for 2.1 and 2.3 coming in the next few weeks. Like any early preview, Group Complete has some rough edges. We'll be hard at work over the next couple of months to make Group Complete a fantastic mobile data collection solution and your participation in our beta will be a huge piece of that. More about Group Complete at http://groupcomplete.com and http://groupcomplete.com/help/start Cheers, Matt -- Matt Adams Radical Dynamic www.radicaldynamic.com
