DataDyne.org, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit organization has extensive relevant experience in mobile phone based applications like DatAagro. Since 2003, DataDyne.org has been dedicated to creating sustainable open source mobile data products to benefit the world’s most needy populations. Driven by the desire to increase the quantity and quality of data available for public benefit use worldwide, and thereby to positively impact development countries, DataDyne.org develops sustainable mobile information technologies, using handheld computers, mobile phones, the internet, and Global Positioning Systems (GPS) to ensure that information can be easily captured and then analyzed for use in developing countries where sustained data collection is normally difficult and, therefore, rarely practiced.
DataDyne.org's premier product is the award-winning EpiSurveyor, a free, open-source software suite which makes it "ridiculously simple" to collect data using handheld computers and cellphones. A winner of the World Bank's Development Marketplace Competition, and funded by the UN Foundation, and the Vodafone Group Foundation, EpiSurveyor was developed in Kenya and the USA and has now been adopted by World Health Organization as a standard for data collection in sub-Saharan Africa. Though EpiSurveyor was originally developed for use with handheld computers, it has been adapted for use by cellphones to further streamline the data collection process.
DataDyne.org believes that programs like EpiSurveyor, and now DatAgro, which leverage innovative, open-source software to communicate via geometrically-expanding mobile computing networks, have the ability to radically improve the way in which information technologies contribute to developing countries by putting the tools for efficient communication, data collection and analysis into the hands of developing country practitioners themselves, and by eliminating the dependence on expensive international consultants.
