Open Data Kit Information

Open Data Kit (ODK) is an open-source suite of tools that helps organizations author, field, and manage mobile data collection solutions. Our goals are to make open-source and standards-based tools which are easy to try, easy to use, easy to modify and easy to scale. To this end, we are proud members of the OpenRosa Consortium and active participants in the JavaRosa project. ODK's core developers are researchers at the University of Washington's Department of Computer Science and Engineering department and active members of Change, a multi-disciplinary group at UW exploring how technology can improve the lives of under-served populations around the world. ODK began as a google.org sponsored sabbatical project under the direction of Gaetano Borriello in April of 2008 at Google's Seattle offices. The initial team included Bill Schilit of Google Research, Adam Lerer of MIT (as a Google intern), and Julie Chin of Google.org. UW CSE graduate students Carl Hartung, Yaw Anokwa, and Waylon Brunette joined the team soon thereafter (as Google interns) and were responsible for the first two deployments of the tools in Uganda and Brazil. Gaetano, Carl, Yaw and Waylon brought ODK back to UW in September of 2009 and Mitchell Sundt joined the team as a software engineer in 2010. Other contributors at UW include Brian DeRenzi, Rohit Chaudhri, Nicola Dell, and numerous undergraduates. See our team page for a full list of participants. ODK is funded by a Google Focused Research Award and through donations from users. ODK is supported by a growing community of developers, implementers and users.