Enterprise and Interagency Kobo Support

#1

Goal

The goal of the feature (set) is to be able to deploy Kobo across an enterprise organization and to allow organizations to share data. We want to create a number of sets of questions or forms, that we can share with other Kobo users (people in our organization or partner organizations) so they can collect similar data and manage it within their account. In addition we want them to be able to allow some of their data sets to be shared with us centrally.

User stories for how and when this would be used by someone on your team

The conservation community wants to collect standardized governance data for protected areas globally. Sue creates a set of questions and a form. She makes the form or questions public, so that others can deploy forms with the same questions. Of the 40 Kobo accounts that use the form, 30 decide that want to give Sue access to the data collected within the form. Sue has a simple method of aggregating the data from the 30 accounts that share data.

Can you sketch out graphically how you think this should look/work in practice?

We are open to this being a partially manual process. One option would be:
i) Ability to create and name a library of shared question sets
ii) Ability to make results from a form available to another Kobo user using some kind of token

How useful would this feature be to other users or organizations?

We need this as part of a collaboration with 5 of the world’s leading conservation organizations. We hear that many NGOs love Kobo but struggle to adopt it based on limited enterprise features.

What can you contribute to making this feature a reality?

We have some resources we could bring to the table here.

#2

Hi! Could you please elaborate on the “token” that you mentioned?

Right now, Sue could create a public “template” in KoBo. Let’s say that I, John, decide to use that template, and additionally that I want to share my collected data with Sue. I could create a form using Sue’s template, and I could grant Sue the “View Submissions” privilege, allowing her to see all my data. Of course, if 29 other people did this, Sue would have to look at 30 different datasets individually, or run 30 different exports and aggregate the data on her own. I’m guessing that this is what you’d like to streamline, but I don’t understand the token idea well enough to recognize how it would help.

#3

To add to @jnm comments, I don’t believe any new development would be needed for the first part of your request “i) Ability to create and name a library of shared question sets”. This should be possible already through the question library. You can create entire form templates and share them with specified users or even group multiple templates into one collection and share the collection with the intended users.

1- Creating a template or collection

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2- Move template to collection

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image.png1099Ă—611 45 KB

3- Share collection

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image.png1086Ă—604 31.3 KB

#4

jnm

Great. Our key remaining need here is for Sue’s account to be programmatically accessed . i.e. using an API with Sue’s credentials or with some other security token, we want a server to periodically pull from the 30 different datas sets.

#5

Hi @palmernet

Would you need the data aggregation done on the KoBo side or would you guys be okay pulling from 30 different urls in the server when you set it up?

Also, would there be any reason for the different owners of the forms who uses the established templates to alter the forms for their own specific uses? If the templates are changed in anyway it could cause some issues trying to aggregate all the data seamlessly.

#6

We’d be happy pulling different URLs

We’d need to manage users altering their forms through error handling.

Jonathan

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#7

Great. This means we should already have the API capabilities that you need.

I’m not sure I understand the above. Could you elaborate? Are you looking for some way to prevent the forms from being changed after they are created from a template?