Fast Company: Water Is Lifeblood, FLOW Checks the Pressure
October 26, 2010
By Fast Company
When a water pump breaks in Africa, does it make a sound? Barely, according to Ned Breslin, CEO of Water for People. “Africa, Asia and Latin America have become wastelands of broken water points because nobody is monitoring, nobody is going back and seeing the impact of their work.” That means millions of dollars of lost investment, he says, and millions of people walking right past what should be shiny new, life-changing infrastructure on their way to drink from the same old polluted river they thought they never had to slurp from again. So Breslin ordered a solution in appropriate contemporary NGO fashion: a smartphone app.
Last week, in front of an opera house filled with tech-geeks and aspiring world changers at Pop!Tech, Breslin released the product: FLOW -- Field Level Operations Watch -- an open source Android app that essentially replaces the clipboard as a data gathering tool for water projects monitoring, or pretty much anything else you need to pound pavement to check up on. It’s devilishly simple, and that’s the point.
FLOW is a multi-lingual, customizable, and instant way to capture and send data back to a central hub. Most importantly though, it integrates GPS tagging and a photo for each entry, crucial for real transparency and number crunching. Once the data is in the cloud, FLOW will automatically generate maps and basic statistics on everything that comes back using Google maps’ or Google Earth’s API.
Dru Borden of Gallatin Systems, the consulting company that designed the app for Water for People over the past nine months, delights at explaining why an app beats a clipboard for collecting surveys. “You can review and edit them right on the device in the field. You can do a variety of analytics on them in the field.”
What do you think?
