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.
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 on OpenSRP, coordinating engineering efforts among teams.
Continue reading OpenSRP Nairobi technology sprint, take two!...
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 work with customers using data for positive social impact. She has a data analysis background and a BSc. in Mathematics and Computer Science. She is an avid traveler.
James is joining our OpenSRP team as Technical Manager. He will be working with engineers from IRD in Pakistan, SID in Indonesia and mPower in Bangladesh to build a next-gen frontline health worker app. James has contributed to the ROK mobile project and MyFitnessPal, among others, and advocates the KISS principle.
Njagi is joining the Ona platform team as an engineering intern. He is currently at Moi University working towards a Bachelor of Science in Informatics, Computer Software Engineering. He is an avid contributor and developer of free and open source software.
Rosalia is joining Ona as Operations Manager. She has 8+ years’ experience in developing financial systems, implementing internal controls, budget planning, procurement, property management and HR management. Rosalia has an MBA in Finance from U.S. International University, CPA-K and BBA in Finance and Accounting.
Sandra is joining the engineering team as Software Engineer in Test. She will lead the testing and quality assurance effort at Ona. She enjoys mentoring with youth incubation centres to demystify STEM to young girls and was awarded for these efforts as a 2014 TechWomen emerging leader.
Welcome to the team, everyone!
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 guidance as we seek to build tools that empower people to make a positive impact with data.