Over the last 18 months, the small but agile Indaba team has worked tirelessly to bring some exciting enhancements to the platform, (Indaba 3.0 as I like to call it), as well as launch some cool projects.  Our hope with these new changes is to further streamline the online data collection process for colleagues and partners around the world.

As our Executive Director, Nathaniel Heller, alluded to in his blog post, “Why We're Investing in Moving Legacy Data Into Indaba” with the changes to the platform, Indaba will now give project managers a way to more easily design, launch and manage the day-to-day aspects of their projects.  

With the help of existing Indaba user insights, we narrowed down the scope of our ever long “wish-list” of platform upgrades functionalities and user interface enhancements.  The major change to the platform includes a whole new interface, Control Panel, which allows project managers and support staff to build key components of their work (uploading questions, creating reusable surveys, adding project contributors and units of analysis.)  

We also updated user functionalities for the existing platform interface, Fieldwork Manager, used by field contributors and project managers to amass data in an organized fashion. It is our hope that changes to this part of Indaba will greatly enhance the data collection process.

Now project managers can assign tasks to users from a “queue” system, which filters through hundreds, if not more, tasks per project. Managers can “swap” different people from one job to another to suit the needs of the project.

One of the upgrades I am most excited about is the ability for managers to ask and send questions to anyone working on the project. This could be done during any of the review or edit stages (as defined by the organization creating a project).  Previously, Indaba would only allow managers to ask questions to the original respondent who created the content. This feature is particularly helpful when a manager needs further clarification on the way something was edited or if a reviewer provides a new source of information and the relevance is not clearly articulated. This feature could also be useful if a project requires verification feedback regarding specific data or information collected from a government official, business entity, etc.

Needless to say, we are thankful to our developers OpenConcept Systems (OCS) who worked tirelessly to ensure the new changes were installed in a timely manner and with as few “bugs” as possible.

— Monika Shepard