Schools in the developing world frequently do not have high bandwidth or reliable connections, limiting their access to web content. As a result, schools are increasingly turning to Offline Educational Resources (OERs), employing purpose-built local hardware to serve content. These approaches can be expensive and difficult to maintain in resource-constrained settings. We present Siskin, an alternative approach that leverages the ubiquity of web browsers to provide a distributed content access cache between user devices on the local network. We demonstrate that this system allows access to web pages offline by identifying the browser as a ubiquitous platform. We build and evaluate a prototype, showing that existing web protocols and infrastructure can be leveraged to create a powerful content cache over a local network.

In resource-constrained communities, organizations often use information and communication technologies to amplify their limited resources to improve education, health, and economic opportunity. Over two-thirds of the world's population have mobile phones, yet less than half are connected to the Internet [23]. Organizations helping disadvantaged populations often rely on mobile devices as their primary computing resource because of their availability in resource-constrained contexts. However, to reach under-served populations, mobile applications often operate in areas with no connectivity or challenged network environments. Unfortunately, many mobile application frameworks are generally not well-suited for long periods of disconnected data collection and management. Furthermore, mobile application frameworks are generally aimed at users with significant technical skills and resources. In this paper, we discuss our experiences building, deploying, and refining the Open Data Kit (ODK) 2.0 tool suite. ODK 2.0 is a modular application framework that facilitates organizations with limited technical capacity to build application-specific information services for use in disconnected environments. We discuss ODK 2.0's flexible abstractions that enable users of varying technical skill levels to create customizable mobile data management solutions. We present ODK 2.0 case studies involving multiple organizations and discuss lessons learned from building a service-based mobile application framework for disconnected data management.

Many organizations in the developing world (e.g., NGOs), include digital data collection in their workflow. Data collected can include information that may be considered sensitive, such as medical or socioeconomic data, and which could be affected by computer security attacks or unintentional mishandling. The attitudes and practices of organizations collecting data have implications for confidentiality, availability, and integrity of data. This work, a collaboration between computer security and ICTD researchers, explores security and privacy attitudes, practices, and needs within organizations that use Open Data Kit (ODK), a prominent digital data collection platform. We conduct a detailed threat modeling exercise to inform our view on potential security threats, and then conduct and analyze a survey and interviews with technology experts in these organizations to ground this analysis in real deployment experiences. We then reflect upon our results, drawing lessons for both organizations collecting data and for tool developers.

Open Data Kit (ODK) is an open-source, modular toolkit that enables organizations to build application-specific mobile information services in resource-constrained environments. Feedback from users and developers about limitations experienced with the ODK 1.x set of tools led to a redesign of the system architecture and the creation of new tools. This demonstration presents a revised tool suite called ODK 2.0. This expanded ODK toolkit aims to increase an organization's data collection and management capabilities by supporting data synchronization, adaptable workflows, more configurable presentation screens, and increasing the diversity of input types by enabling new data input methods on mobile devices.

Mobile devices are integral to the workflows of many organizations working in rural or disconnected contexts. Data is often collected on mobile phones and tablets using tools like Open Data Kit (ODK). However, some of the applications require users to revisit and update previously collected data, necessitating easy viewing of stored data. To make it easier for organizations to create flexible information services, we present ODK Tables, an Android tool that allows users to enter and curate data on mobile devices. Tables leverages web tools to make mobile app creation simple. It provides abstractions to make the process straightforward and allows app designers to access data through a JavaScript API. App designers can create a custom app using only a small number of HTML and JavaScript files. This facilitates the creation of a custom user interface but leaves storage, data management, and synchronization to the framework. The result is a fully featured Android app based on established web-based tools with full support for disconnected operation.