Login screen of the POSIT-Haiti app in Creole.

Trishan and I made another trip to Haiti last week to field test the latest version of POSIT-Haiti.

On Thursday I traveled overnight to Cotes de Fer for a distribution event on Friday.  Trishan remained back in the Jacmel office.  We field tested the bar-code feature.  There were 210 beneficiaries and the app was easily able to keep up with work flow.  We processed all 210 in about 90 minutes.  As soon as the event concluded, the SMS messages were  transmitted back to the Frontline server at the Jacmel office.  The distribution site at Cotes de Fer had a very strong signal — 4 bars.  Transmitting the 12 messages took less than 2 minutes and we received an acknowledgement from the server in around 15 minutes.  The field test confirmed — as had our many lab tests — that the barcode feature is working very well.  End-to-end, the POSIT-Haiti app is working extremely well.

On Saturday we met with the ACDI/VOCA team in Jacmel to discuss some additional audit scripts that we are working on to make it easier to determine that the app is working properly.  This may have been our last visit to Haiti for a while, as it looks like ACDI/VOCA may be winding down their food security program in Haiti.  Hopefully they or another NGO will be able to use the app — or a modified version of it — in another project.

Highlights of the Hartford event can be seen here:

RHoKHartford from Under Consideration on Vimeo.

On Saturday, December 1, I had the opportunity to experience firsthand the intersection of technology and social good when I participated in the Global Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) event, at Trinity College.  As a K-8 Computer Science teacher, I had anticipated that I would attend the event as an observer, but instead, found myself quickly immersed in the activities.

The first step for my group was the selection of the problem definition we wished to tackle. I found myself drawn to one of the featured sanitation problem definitions from the World Bank’s Sanitation Hackathon problem set. Thankfully, my desire to work on a project aimed at helping girls was also shared by fellow participant and Trinity College student, Pauline Lake.

During the initial brainstorming process, a representative of RHoK, Elizabeth Sabet from Second Muse (http://www.secondmuse.com/), suggested we touch base with other RHoK events that might be simultaneously working on the same challenge.   We managed to track down teams from DC and New York and connect with them remotely.  It was an interesting experience to hear how others were tackling the same problem and reinforced the potential magnitude of our collective impact.

We also had the good fortune to speak with the expert in Washington, DC who had proposed the problem. In addition to explaining the details of the project (the introduction of menstrual health education and gender-friendly sanitation facilities in Cameroon http://www.sanitationhackathon.org/sanitation-girls-education-empowerment), she also clarified the requirements for the App (monitoring girls’ attendance at schools after implementing gender-friendly sanitation facilities) and further explained how she envisioned the local NGO’s implementing this technology.

After the initial discussions were concluded, we returned to brainstorming solutions, then worked up a prototype and diligently debugged our App.  Designing the App entailed determining the components, the layout, the code, the logo and the name. I was a novice App Inventor programmer (having taken my first App programming class this past summer with Trinity Professor, Ralph Morelli), so Pauline took the lead.

While designing the App, I envisioned how my own students would tackle the task.  Independent by nature, many of them would initially shy away from collaborating, thus missing out on the benefits of working within a group.  Computer programming presents the perfect opportunity for collaboration, as each person brings a unique talent to the process.  For example, in the case of my students, some excel at drawing, others have a firmer grasp on the intricacies of App inventor, and others’ personal strengths lie in their communication skills.  Software development is indeed a group effort.  I am eager to share this insight with my students.

I also want to share with them the opportunity to work on an application that will be used to help others.  To this end, I am happy to report that, on Saturday, May 4, I will be hosting the first ever Random Hacks of Kindness Junior at the Fraser Woods Montessori School.  The objective of the daylong event is to show students that, as technology creators, computing can  be more than a media and entertainment outlet – it can be used a tool for change.

The app Pauline and I created at Trinity, Empowering Girls, will track the attendance of girls in Northern Cameroon schools before and after the implementation of gender-sensitive sanitation facilities. We were driven and motivated by the knowledge that our program would be put to good use.

When duplicating Saturday’s event with students in grades 4-8, I will definitely stress how their participation is part of a bigger effort.  Attending RHoK Hartford, helped to solidify other objectives as well; the need to come supplied with student-friendly problem definitions, inspiring user stories, and, of course, plenty of refreshments.

My first experience “hacking for humanity” was very inspiring, both as a K-8 Computer Science teacher and as a humanitarian endeavor; which, unbeknownst to most, can actually go together!  I am convinced that my students will come away with similar feelings.  I can’t wait for May!

Bluetooth is a wireless technology standard for exchanging data over short distances from fixed and mobile devices. It creates small networks with high levels of security that can connect several devices to exchange information.

I decided to implement a Bluetooth synchronization plugin for POSIT because I wanted to provide users with an additional method to share Finds. I realized that there will be cases where users will have no access to a WI-FI or data connection but there will still be a need to transfer and/or update Finds from one device to another.

I really hope this plugin proves useful for our POSIT users!

Android devices have a locking mechanism that can be very difficult to break. After a certain number of failed attempts, the user’s Google e-mail address and password is required to access the information. Since so much personal data is stored on these devices, it’s nice to know that even the FBI can’t break in.

According to this article from Wired, the FBI was unable to access a suspects personal data during an investigation. You would think the FBI with all of their expertise in security would be able to access the data through various means. After consulting with several forensic experts, it appears the Android locking system cannot be bypassed through software. The next step would be reaching the data via hardware, however that carries risk of damaging the phone and losing the data itself.

The only way to gain access to that data was by issuing a warrant for data retrieval from Google. Apparently it is fairly common for personal data to be provided to law enforcement for some investigations. Google released a statement saying: “Like all law-abiding companies, we comply with valid legal process. Whenever we receive a request we make sure it meets both the letter and spirit of the law before complying. If we believe a request is overly broad, we will seek to narrow it.”

When mentioning this topic to the rest of the team, Yemi mentioned a program called TrueCrypt that is designed to allow hiding encrypted data while at the same time having legal plausible deniability. For those of you interested in maintaining their data with utmost secrecy may want to give this program a try.

The subject of online security is becoming a bigger concern as technology becomes a larger part of our lives. Just to give you a jump start, an article by LifeHacker called How to Stay Secure Online covers basic steps many of us should be taking when using the Internet.

On another note, just to put some faces to our developers for this Winter 2012 UCOSP team, I found a picture taken of us during the Vancouver code sprint.

From left to right: Brittney Franzoi, Rob McDiarmid, Andrew Matsusaka, Yemi Ilupeju, Elias Adum, Eric Enns

1. Ensure a consistent user interface between the phone and tablet. Below is the updated tablet design:

2.  Develop a generic synching library for all synching procedures so that new synchronization methods can be easily implemented in the future.

3. Enhance the map display to allow for the grouping of Finds by location. This will give users the ability to easily discover patterns of interest in their Finds.

4. Improve the Bluetooth communication of Finds to simplify information sharing between users.

5. Allow for the “scanning” of bar codes to read in Find information using the phone’s camera.

6. Toggle Plugins on/off, such as the SMS, Twitter, or Tracker Activity Plugins, so that testing is less intrusive to the rest of the application.

We’re enthusiastic and can’t wait to see the improvements take effect!

So I decided that I should find a solution to this. I armed myself with my Google search knowledge and searched away. These searches led me too http://code.google.com/p/android-screen-monitor/ and http://code.google.com/p/androidscreencast/ both apps which will copy and display the screen buffer through an adb connection on your computer in a window. Both had similar features with android screencast having the ability to accept certain inputs from the computer.

In our last weekly meeting I demoed these applications and expect to see them as a common utility used in our upcoming meetings.

In this team: Andrew Matsusaka, Eric Enns, and myself (University of Manitoba), Elias Adum, Brittney Franzoi, and Rob McDiarmid (University of Toronto). The team is headed up by Ralph Morelli (POSIT mentor) and he is helped by Trishan de Lanerolle.

By the way, everyone on the team is a real stand-up guy (and girl ) and they really know their stuff!

This year, the POSIT team had its UCOSP code sprint in Vancover from Jan 20-Jan 22. We all stayed at the Holiday Inn and did the 40 minute trip from there to the University of British Columbia for the better part of that weekend. All code meetings were held at the UBC and it was quite an experience! We even had the right distribution of MAC to PC users (even )

To help coordinate our meetings and because Skype is so passe, Google Hangouts was our weapon this time. Don’t laugh:

HFOSS UCOSP Group Google hangout

During the weekend, we set up our environments on both laptops and phones (POSIT is an Android app). I can tell you that I am very excited about the possibilities of POSIT. I downloaded (by mistake) the medical version of the POSIT app and its cool how many ingenious ideas can come from the basic concept of creating Finds and manipulating that information from a central location.

Throughout this season, the team will identify app issues (because knowing is half the battle) and fixing them (because fixing is half our evaluation marks ). But i can tell you this, we polled ourselves as a team this past weekend and everyone on the team joined the POSIT project because of the good it can do, and its cool factor, of course, so expect good things!

Well that’s it for now. A line in our POSIT site says: “If you want to improve POSIT, we love you”. The whole team is raring to go get on coding, fixing and blogging, so yea,

“We love you too POSIT”.

We started off the term with an experimental version of POSIT that had been rebuilt with a pluggable architecture that would hopefully make it a lot easier to customize the app according to clients’ needs. However, since the new architecture was fairly new, the actual functionality was pretty rough. For this reason, our UCOSP team spent much of the early part of the term helping Ralph and Rachel out with testing and patching bugs while they continued to build features back into the new architecture. As POSIT got incrementally nicer each week, we would then gleefully load the new version onto our phones and do horrible things to it until it broke.

Later in the term, as POSIT was getting more stable, we each chose individual projects to expand POSIT’s functionality. All of us eventually decided on function plugins for the app, which I believe have already been discussed by other members of my team. Here’s an overview of what my teammates have accomplished:

Twitter Plugin – Stanley had a neat idea early in the term to combine POSIT with Twitter. His plugin uses the Twitter4j library to give users the ability to post finds to their Twitter accounts. The wiki page for Stanley’s plugin is available here: http://code.google.com/p/posit-mobile/wiki/TwitterFunctionPlugin

Camera Plugin – POSIT’s camera functionality is one of the things I found most striking about the app when I was first introduced to it. Gordon’s plugin puts the ability to take pictures and associate them with your find back into the app using the new architecture. Find out more about it on the plugin’s wiki page: http://code.google.com/p/posit-mobile/wiki/Camera_plugin_with_syncing

Tracker Plugin – Another nifty feature that was begging to be added back in is POSIT’s tracker functionality. It provides the ability to track the path of someone’s expedition when using the app. This was Kalin’s project, and you can read about it here: http://code.google.com/p/posit-mobile/wiki/Tracker_Activity_Walkthrough

Location Aware To Do Reminder Plugin – Without disparaging anyone else, I think Eric’s plugin is probably the coolest. His To Do plugin allows you to set reminders for yourself that are linked to a find’s location. It monitors your own location and will alert you when you are in close proximity to the reminder location. You can read all about it on the wiki page: http://code.google.com/p/posit-mobile/wiki/To_Do_Reminder_Walkthrough

SMS Plugin – This was my plugin, so forgive me if I spend a disproportionate amount of time talking about it. I wanted to do something similar to what was done with the version of POSIT used in Haiti. The deployment of wireless Internet in Haiti isn’t exactly ubiquitous, so for them it was important that they be able to share data without relying on the Internet. For this reason, they built a whole synchronization system that used SMS messaging. My plugin’s functionality is a bit simpler than that. I implemented SMS functionality merely as a way of sending and receiving a single find over SMS. The tricky part about this was that, while the Acdi Voca app knew exactly what its Find object looked like, I had to contend with the fact that the user might be using a Find Plugin about which I don’t know the details. I’m pretty happy with the result, and my hope is that the code I have written will also be of help to anyone who wants to extend POSIT’s SMS functionality even further. The wiki page I created for the plugin is here: http://code.google.com/p/posit-mobile/wiki/SMSFunctionPlugin

And that just about wraps up everything I have to say! Thanks everyone again for letting me be involved with this. I think it’s great what you guys are doing and I wish you the best of luck in future terms.

Ryan McLeod

I worked on POSIT as part of the UCOSP program for the Fall 2011 Semester. Mobile software development is a fascinating area and I knew I wanted to work with it. Working with POSIT was a great opportunity to further my interest in developing Android software. The tremendous flexibility in choice of projects that the UCOSP program offered, allowed me to gain valuable experience in the areas I am interested in and passionate about.

I worked with POSIT’s Tracker Activity: a function plug-in that tracks the phone’s location by collecting its altitude, latitude and longitude, displays the current expedition on a Google map in Tracker Activity’s UI, saves the points on the phone’s database and synchronizes the points with POSIT’s server. My project for the semester was to reincorporate Tracker Activity into POSIT’s new plug-in architecture.

The ability to share expeditions demonstrates Tracker Activity’s important applicable functionality. Improving efficiency via storing and coordinating expeditions amongst individuals in a team for such things as search and rescue missions is an example of how Tracker Activity may be used.

Identifying issues and fixing bugs made up the beginning of the semester which allowed me to become familiar with POSIT and my project. The underlying result was a deeper understanding of the Android and POSIT environments which built the foundation for my work on Tracker Activity.

Challenges included learning the infrastructure of POSIT and Tracker Activity. Another challenge was figuring out how to alter Tracker Activity’s code to fit POSIT’s new infrastructure without losing the intended and existing functionality of Tracker Activity. Working with the code and debugging it as well as Tracker Activity’s documentation allowed me to eventually get comfortable with its implementation and work productively on the project. My project mentor, Ralph Morelli provided valuable guidance and support throughout this project.

This was a tremendous learning experience. By working with this project I learned a great deal about working in a distributed team as well as Android software development. From working with an open-source project such as POSIT I now appreciate how a wide range of viewpoints can create unique features which differentiate a product from others in its market. POSIT, which serves a valuable and important purpose to society, such as aiding in search and rescue missions, has furthered my insights into the ways that mobile technology can serve society beyond the most recognized means of socializing and entertainment.
Furthermore, I have enhanced my understanding of how to manage and organize a project’s code-base and the people in a distributed team. I have enjoyed the opportunity of working with the talented individuals on my team and I have learned from them the value of creative thinking in coming up with new ideas and solutions to problems.

This project was a worthwhile experience and has greatly enhanced my understanding of mobile development and its potential uses in society.

Now it’s time for another progress report from the POSIT team! During the past few weeks, we have all been working hard to integrate our individual project proposals into the POSIT application. We’ve successfully integrated one of the student’s project proposals so far. This new functionality notifies the user when they have reached a point of interest! The user sets the reminder by specifying a particular date and location. When the user is near the location on the desired date, POSIT will notify the user of the reminder.

Another new functionality that is coming soon is the ability to tweet your finds. If tweeting your find isn’t satisfying enough, we’re also adding in the ability to send finds using SMS. We’re also adding back the basic functionality to take pictures of your finds. The tracker activity, which allows you to trace your route of how you came about your finds is also being reimplemented after being redesigned.

POSIT is becoming more and more awesome. But, during our progress we also faced many challenges. One of my biggest challenges is having to work with an emulator. Unfortunately I think I’ve reached the limitations of the emulator as our application has gotten more and more advanced. Programming on an actual phone probably would have made a huge difference in every aspect.