We are happy to say that the “global” IoGT site went live in Feb this year – a major and very rewarding milestone after a difficult start to the project. We intend the global site to be a central content repository that regional IoGT sites can pull from and customise for their particular context. In time, we hope that customisations that prove more generally useful will also flow the other way, into the central repository, or even across regional sites directly.
This year has seen the introduction of dashboards for IoGT, allowing the results of user surveys to be displayed automatically in Apache Superset. The integration with Superset creates dashboards for each survey using visualisations that are appropriate for each question type – helping IoGT site owners to save time and use best-practice in their dashboards and data analysis.
We have also completed an integration with RapidPro that brings access to automated messaging flows into IoGT. As with everything else in IoGT, the chatbot integration works without Javascript and is therefore suitable for users of feature phones. Potentially, we could see another of IDEMS’s projects, ParentText, integrated into IOGT, as well as other content.
Work on migrating UNICEF’s IoGT websites from V1 to v2 accelerated quite abruptly in September after the hosting environment of the remaining V1 sites unexpectedly failed. With no on-going support for V1, there was no choice but to move forward to V2. It has been a busy two months since then, but IDEMS has now successfully completed the migration of all sites to V2. The work has been helped greatly by our use of Docker containers, Helm charts and Kubernetes, which has allowed us to quickly and consistently replicate the migration process, whilst taking account of slight configuration differences between some sites. At the time of writing, 60% of regional IoGT sites have been launched and are serving content to actual users, and the remaining 40% are awaiting approval for go-live.
In 2023, we hope to keep pushing IoGT forward with Open Data Kit (ODK) integration, to create questionnaires which are not restricted to the IoGT platform but that can be exported or imported to and from other platforms supporting ODK. We also have a vision of creating IoGT as a safe space where we allow users to chat and add moderated content. Creating chat rooms and forums to help bring individual experiences to the content.