Introducing ona.R - Easily use Ona in R
One of the great things about the R programming language is the thousands of packages users have written to solve problems in areas of data import, data wrangling and data visualization. We’re glad to introduce ona.R, a package that helps you import data from your Ona account into R. This package is a direct fork of Prabhas Pokharel’s awesome formhub.R library. As we work
OpenSRP Nairobi technology sprint, take two!
In mid-March, Ona hosted the second OpenSRP engineering sprint, bringing engineers from around the world to Ona’s Nairobi office. Engineering partners from SID (Indonesia), mPower (Bangladesh), IHS (Pakistan), OpenMRS, ThoughtWorks and Jembi (South Africa) joined the sprint to enhance the user experience and performance of OpenSRP, an mHealth platform that empowers frontline health workers in developing countries to deliver more effective healthcare. Ona is the technology lead
Five additions to the Ona team
Two weeks ago, the entire Ona team was together in Nairobi. It was a great opportunity to take a pic outside our office. If you look at the photo carefully, you’ll notice we’ve added a few vital roles. A warm welcome to Faith, James, Njagi, Rosalia and Sandra. Faith is joining our support team to
Ona endorses the Principles for Digital Development
Ona is proud to endorse the Principles for Digital Development. While both improving our technology platform and consulting with partners, our team is guided the Principles on a daily basis. Technology affords new opportunities for governments, development and humanitarian organizations and communities to be increasingly data driven, collaborative and accountable. We believe the principles provide important
Updates to user permissions in ODK Collect
One of the major new features that we introduced with the release of our new platform last fall is the ability to assign role-based permissions to projects. This had been one of our most requested features from the previous Ona version, and we’re excited to support this now for all users on ona.io. Users can now create projects on Ona and add
Exporting data with labels
A few emails have come in requesting support for questions as headings in data exports. We have heeded your call and are glad to announce this is now possible. When exporting CSV, Excel and CSV Zip files, you can choose whether labels and/or names show up as column headers. Using XLSForm syntax, the label column contains the actual
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
Automating Style In Clojure
We do everything we can to improve code quality. Our process includes rigorous code reviews focused on getting the correct level of abstraction, modularity, and reusability. We quickly realized that nitpicking code format and line length was distracting us from our goals. It isn’t that those aspects aren’t important, but that they should be standardized
Squashing Commits with an Interactive Git Rebase
There are plenty of reasons to get familiar with and start using git’s interactive rebase. You might want to edit a commit message, delete commits, reorder commits, or edit commits. Here we will talk about using it to “squash” (as in combine, merge, or meld) multiple commits into a single commit. In our specific use case,
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