Wednesday morning we
checked out of the Alcholi Ber hotel in Gulu and hit the road again, driving
about two hours north-east to Kitgum.
I had begun to get a little weirded out that my 4 days of stubble had
started to look ginger… Had I
inherited some of the red hair gene shared by two of my uncles and
cousins!?!? Alas, I found out when
I eventually had a chance to wash, my newly found facial hair was just full of
red dust from the roads..!
After arriving in
Kitgum, we headed straight to meet with another local NGO doing FTR work,
called KICWA. This time round we
saved ourselves a lot of time by using a live demo in order to help explain
exactly what RapidFTR did. It
turns out a picture is worth a thousand words; but a real life example is worth
even more. Today was to be another
momentous day for RapidFTR, as we conducted our first usuability tests with
real end users! 
Of the group of six
child social workers, most had simple mobile phones; one had an old Blackberry
phone. Our demo set up was two
netbook computers, one running the RapidFTR server; and a number of
Blackberries running RapidFTR, syncing to the server via wifi, to demonstrate a
scenario where phone networks are unavailable. We were really pleased to see how quickly they picked up the
user interface, and the concepts of creating new forms on the web app on the
netbooks, and synchronising records between devices, etc. Winnie, who had never picked up a
Blackberry before, was soon comfortably registering her colleagues on the
system. And the more tech savvy
amongst them were eagerly replicating their own paper forms for data collection
on RapidFTR. J
Zubair and I each
captured about two pages of really good suggestions from the team at KICWA on
how we can make RapidFTR more useful and more easily usable. Some highlights were: repeating forms
to be used for follow up interviews with a child (which echoed exactly what
GUSCO had asked for); an alerts / reminders system to keep track on which
children need to be checked on; and the ability to switch between local
language and English versions of the forms on the Blackberry / web app.
They showed us their
own Access database, which they currently used at their main site for keeping
details of all children they work with.
This raised some useful discussion about how best RapidFTR will feed
into other existing systems / processes.
(Given that RapidFTR is primarily a tool for rapid registration of
children in emergency situations.)
Their ‘techie’ guy was clearly excited about even the very simple
application of using RapidFTR’s web app as a simpler, easier data collection
tool.
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