GATHER is a project of AED-SATELLIFE in collaboration with Dimagi and our partners whose job it is to collect and analyze data to improve the health of their communities. The initial development was funded by the Academy for Educational Development. The Rockefeller Foundation has provided AED-SATELLIFE with additional support to bring GATHER to this next phase of its development.

The GATHER consortium is a standards-based architecture designed to facilitate data collection and reporting, with pluggable and interchangeable components/modules for data entry from a full range of wired and mobile computing devices and technologies, including desktops, laptops, telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), text messaging with cell phones, interactive voice recognition (IVR), geographical positioning systems, and bar-code scanners.

Designed as a tool to help the development community and low-resource countries meet their needs for data and reporting in all sectors, not solely health, GATHER will utilize existing open source data collection tools that adhere to the XForms standard, such as the J2ME JavaRosa client produced by the OpenRosa consortium.

Currently, AED-SATELLIFE and Dimagi are conducting the first field test of GATHER in collaboraiton with the Ugandan Ministry of Health. GATHER is being used on cell-phones at 20 health clinics to collect and report weekly disease surveillance data to the GATHER server located at the Ministry of Health’s Department of Epidemiology. The field test with run through mid-August and a report of the outcome of that expereince will be posted shortly thereafter. The field test is using the JavaRosa mobile client on the Nokia 6085 and communicating to GATHER over GPRS.

Plans are currently underway for the next phase of development – which will include addressing what we learn in the Ugandan field test. We hope that GATHER will be ready for broader use by the end of 2009.

The project website is located at http://www.gatherdata.org/