HISP WORKSHOP IN INDIA

I decided to join this arrangement as I considered it a good opportunity to gain experience for the further development. The workshop was arranged in a city called Gourgon outside Delhi and was attended by members of the local HISP teams in Oslo, Delhi, Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam) and Dar es Salaam (Tanzania). Here I would get in touch with people that have worked within the health sector of developing countries for a long time and are able to give me valuable insight and qualified opinions. I wanted to make the most of the two weeks I was supposed to stay in India and get as much input as possible. In order to avoid wasting time on a project that later turned out to be doomed to failure, my goal was to detect potential limitations and pitfalls at an early stage as well.

84 Workshop in Gourgon, India.

The fact that people generally are new to GIS definitely complicated the process of getting useful feedback. One of the first days of the workshop I handed out a questionnaire that hopefully would bring in valuable suggestions and information. People were supposed to draw on their knowledge from both the health sector and the IT sector in developing countries and present their thoughts on what they expect from a GIS for the DHIS, what kind of features they would find useful and so on.

Unfortunately, the majority considered themselves unable to contribute because they had no experience with GIS at all. And, the small response I got was just basic stuff that I had already contemplated and either discarded or found solutions to. I could not settle with the poor feedback and realized that I needed to engage people. To do this I

 gave an extensive presentation. Firstly, I demonstrated what the application could do so far from a user’s point of view and people seemed to like it. I used maps and data from their own countries to increase the interest further. Secondly, taken into consideration that everyone had knowledge of the DHIS

85 either as a user or as a developer, I explained how the GIS application is

integrated into it. Lastly, for the developers that were interested, I presented the GIS client from a more technical perspective and even shared snippets of code.

 created and arranged two GIS assignments:

o The first one was sort of a walk-through on how to get the application up and running in their own computers and thus mainly intended for users. I wanted people to get familiar with it and hopefully more interested in GIS in general. To speed up the process I handed out disks with the necessary files and software, as the available internet connection was not very fast. o The second assignment focused on the technical part. It requested those

who could see themselves as future GIS developers to use the provided material to get their basic skills up to speed on modern JavaScript, get introduced to the different frameworks etc. Additionally, I offered personal assistance and training.

 invited everyone that did not want to set it up in their own computer to have a personal GIS lecture. This way, they could simply use my computer to try out the application and provide feedback.

These actions elicited a completely different enthusiasm than the clearly less motivating questionnaire. I was happy to see that people responded in a very positive manner. I mentioned that I wanted to discover potential limitations and pitfalls at an as early stage as possible. In this regard, the assignments turned out to be quite useful as two crucial issues were raised by those who installed and started playing with the GIS in their own computers. They were both related to the browsers’ ability to handle huge amounts of geo-spatial vector data.

 The first one occurred when one of the developers tried to load a shapefile of his own country, converted to GeoJSON, into the application. This simply forced the browser to crash. After some debugging it turned out that there was nothing wrong with the file; the reason seemed to be the size of the script, which left me a rather terrifying feeling. Other web based GIS samples I had seen were mostly cities and other small areas. If country shapefiles were generally intended for

86 desktop GISs and thus were going to crash your web browser, my whole web based GIS project idea for the DHIS 2 would be in danger.

 The second issue was related to the format GeoJSON as it seemed to be inefficient and suboptimized regarding the file size. What looked like unnecessarily many properties per object in order to validate as a vector data format was bad news as I had just discovered that modern web browsers were having a hard time

handling those huge files. I decided to spend time and effort to figure these things out. As this is of great interest both for this project and for the web based GIS movement in general, I discuss this thoroughly in the next chapter.

In order to get the most of my stay in India, I decided to extend it with two weeks after the workshop had finished. The GIS implementor for HISP India wanted to scrap the prototype they had been trying out (described in the previous chapter) and start contributing to the new project. A good thing for me was that he got me in contact with representatives from the Ministry of Health. And even better, some of them had user experience with HealthMapper. I considered these two weeks very useful as I collected a whole lot of valuable feedback regarding GIS functionality and user interface from end- users. The next two months were spent building a more comprehensive prototype that actually could be used as a GIS application and not only a tool that could look promising in screen shots. I wanted to have something robust ready before June as I had the opportunity to join a one month stay in the West African country Sierra Leone, where three DHIS work shops were taking place.