Ona will be at the 2016 World Humnitarian Summit in Istanbul on May 23 and 24. We’ll be at the Innovation Market Place in booth 039 to talk about our work in Somalia with DFID. We’ll also be available to talk about the Ona platform.
Stop by the booth to say hello!
Ona will be at the 2016 ICT4D Conference in Nairobi next week. We’ll be giving a talk, speaking on a panel, and meeting with partners.
Ukang’a Dickson is speaking about Advanced Mapping, Workflows, Real-Time Data Analysis and Sharing with Ona on Wednesday, May 18 @ 10:45 am.
Matt Berg is participating on an OpenSRP panel on Monday, May 16 @ 11:30 am. He is also giving an OpenSRP Technology Overview on the same day.
Throughout the conference you can find the Ona team camped out in the Exhibit Hall at the Safari Park Hotel Monday, May 16 through Thursday, May 19. We’ll be at Booth 7 representing both Ona and as part of the OpenSRP team. We’re talking about what’s new and what’s next on the roadmap for Ona.
If you want to meet, come by the booth or email cgulas@ona.io.
We’re constantly working to improve Ona, but we’ve overlooked letting the world know what’s been updated. To fix this, we’ve added Release Notes to keep track of updates in each release. We’ll also be sending monthly email summaries to those of you on the mailing list. Here’s the latest summary:
We’ve added a few things to charts that make them more useful. For starters, you can now group one field by another. This feature is supported for select one category fields. We’ve also added the ability to define custom colors for pie charts and stacked bar charts. This is an extension of the work from last year that allowed specifying colors for responses on the Ona maps. With our new interactive charts it is now also possible to save charts to a dashboard, allowing you to quickly refer to the charts you are most interested in. In addition to these new features, we’ve made performance improvements that should make the charts interface more snappy.
We’ve enabled support for HXL-enabled forms on form downloads and exports. Humanitarian Exchange Language (HXL) is a standard for increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of data exchange during humanitarian crises.
We’ll soon be supporting exports to Google Sheets, which will allow users to push data to a spreadsheet Google Drive. Users will be able to authenticate and either send data to an existing sheet or a new sheet. A live update option will ensure that the Google sheet is updated every time the Ona form receives new data.
I recently gave a talk at a data science meetup organized by the good people at iHub Research, on using Unix shell tools to work with data. It was primarily a hands-on workshop, but the slides I prepared may be useful to those who couldn’t make it. You can find the presentation embedded below.
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 to improve ona.R, we’ll work to ensure it can be easily used with platforms like Formhub.