mWater Feature update: Admin Regions

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.