Creating and deploying surveys, part 1: 

Creating and deploying surveys, part 2 (begins with how to deploy a survey)

How to build a survey (focus on question types and organization)

This past year, mWater partner, Haiti Outreach, has lead an effort to map every water point in Haiti and monitor it for functionality and contamination. They've done a stellar job with 3 departments (of 10) mapped. In addition, they overlaid satellite imagery of households in Haiti. This mWater dashboard shows how you can now visualize water stress by households near water points that work. Click on a water point to see a real-time calculation of the households within a 500 meter walk to a water point.

Using this data, any NGO, government office, or multilateral organization can easily determine where the water stress is highest and where to put their next investment. We only have the household data for Haiti so far, but we're hoping this proof of concept will scale worldwide.
https://share.mwater.co/…/dashboard_link/60812638ff654b37a1…

A group of mWater users reported serious problems using the mWater app on the Huawei Y6 5-inch smartphone. We have added this phone to our Devices Knowledge Base as a device that is not recommended. 

If you already have this phone in use, watch for parts of the mWater Surveyor homepage and map page not appearing. Some users have found that updating the Android System Webview app in the Google Play Store resolves this. Some users have found resetting the phone altogether to factory settings resolves this. 

​As a reminder, before beginning any fieldwork, setup all phones and tablets using the mWater Android setup checklist. You should do this on good quality wifi, not using mobile data, as it will require much data to perform the updates. 

Since Android devices often turn GPS accuracy to low or off when the battery gets low, many mWater users do not realize their GPS is not working well for them. To help prevent this, we added an alert in the Surveyor app when your GPS is not set to high accuracy. Each time you start the app, mWater will check on your mobile phone or tablet's location settings. Clicking yes will change the Android settings automatically so that you are always collecting the highest quality data in the field. As a reminder, computer browsers do not have GPS capability so this is only for the native Android app.

​This feature is only available after updating the Surveyor app. Users will notice a one-time request that they go to the Google Play Store and update their app. 

Join mWater co-founder and CEO Annie Feighery in Kampala this Friday for an mWater Data Days workshop. Learn how to use the free mWater platform map and monitor water points and other types of sites, create and deploy your own forms, manage users in your organization, and visualize your data. Thanks to the generous support of our partner, Ugandan Water Project, the cost to attend this event is only 100000 USh (or 30 USD). We will also be giving away a free Android phone to one lucky participant! We hope you can join us.
Date: Friday June 22, 2016
Time: 10:00 - 15:00 (lunch included)
Location: Machame Health Club (click here for directions or see map below)
RSVP: Recommended. Use form below.

Now the Maps tab in the portal offers two new views, light background and dark background. This is particularly useful for making your data points pop in presentations for slides and reports. The feature is located in the Config tab for the map.

You can also specify the color and shape of your data markers in the Layers tab by removing the pre-set layers and ticking Add Layer. 

mWater allows users to calculate the administrative regions of a GPS-set location. This means users can collect the district, province, state, etc level of information for a given point. Administrative regions differ from GPS coordinates in that they are political boundaries that may change over time. mWater works with users and global databases to keep this information as up-to-date as possible. 

We are in the process of removing Admin Region questions in forms. There are a number of reasons for this, notably that, unlike every other mWater question type, they do not work offline (because the underlying database is far too large to keep on a mobile phone) and because they are often redundant information to a location question. We found that only a small amount of users have attempted to use this question type so we do not expect this change to have a large impact.

Instead, you will now be able to turn on an option in the Location question to calculate administrative regions. The default is off. This can be done even after collecting data, and simply makes available an administrative region for data analysis, filtering, choropleth maps, etc. For data exports, this will show up as an extra column in addition to the GPS coordinates. 

Please ensure that your forms do not use administrative region questions, though of course we will grandfather existing data. Email info@ mwater.co with any questions. 

mWater's John Feighery is planning the next tutorial tomorrow, 6 April at facebook.com/mwaterco 700 EST / 1200 GMT / 1300 CET/ 1500 EAT.
This week's topic: How to build great forms in mWater. 
John will guide this 30 minute online session, where he will cover the different question types; how to use forms to monitor sites such as water points or communities; and tips and tricks for building effective surveys.
Remember to 'Like' the mWater page to receive notifications when we go Live. You can come back later to view the video at any time. If you join us Live, we can answer your questions and comments as we go.

This week we began a new series of Facebook Live tutorials. Anyone who "likes" the mWater Facebook page can view these tutorials. Clicking subscribe on a video also alerts you when a new one is available. 

Click here to view Part 1 and Part 2 videos. 

I've always wanted mWater to be a social network for water, sanitation, and health. This week, that effort got much stronger with a few key updates in the mWater Surveyor app.

In the old fashioned world of monitoring and evaluation, the burden of proof was placed on why data should be made public. However, with the new, porous data environment where we are all connected in the real and virtual world, the burden of proof is on why data should be kept private. At a base level, people deserve to have access to data collected about them, their communities, and their water. At an organizational and management level, we can all make faster and better progress if we work together than if we silo ourselves apart in hard drives and file cabinets.

mWater was designed to collaborate with data. We created our apps and data portal to make sharing feel easy and safe, building in three levels of privacy.

• Sites mapped in mWater can be marked Private if the data collector feels there is a significant need to not let anyone outside their organization see it. This is ideal for households and security risks. Private data can still be anonymized and shared as indicators in the mWater Portal.
  
• Sites can be marked Protected if the person or organization creating them does not want anyone else to change the key information like name and location, but others can update status and refer to the site in their own forms over time. This is the most used protection level. This is built for collaboration. Your organization can always disaggregate your own updates and data from others' and yet you can build on the knowledge of others over time.
  
• The third setting is Public, where anyone can update the location and name as well as collect data based on the site. This setting is ideal for public mapping projects like a national water point census.

Now, sites that are Protected and Public can be shared to social media with the new Facebook and Twitter icons in each site page. This means your team can update their online friends about their progress monitoring a site. You can keep funders connected with their assets through a Facebook Groups page. Also, sites now have permanent URLs so you can post a site page to a report, an email, or a funding campaign like GoFundMe. Custom users can pay mWater to create site pages unique to their organization, with their logo and special fields like user stories and budget tracking. 

These updates bring monitoring sites like water points, sanitation facilities, schools, and health clinics into the virtual world. This allows for more opportunities to collaborate with your work. Most importantly, this allows communities where these sites are an easy access point to be educated of and involved in your work. 

Social sharing and site URLs were the investment of Earth Echo, which is also using these features for the World Water Monitoring Challenge. mWater powers their app and map for global surface water monitoring. Check them out!