UW CSE Ph.D. student Yaw Anokwa today received the 2010 Antonio Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest for his work on Open Data Kit.
“This year’s Pizzigati Prize winner, Yaw Anokwa, will be accepting the award on behalf of a team of University of Washington doctoral students who have crafted, in Open Data Kit, an open source application that unleashes the mobile phone’s social change potential.
“The 28-year-old Anokwa and his fellow developers Carl Hartung and Waylon Brunette began their work on Open Data Kit in 2008. Released last spring, the software turns cell phones into tools for collecting data ‘in the field’ and moving that data, with just a few finger swipes, to central Web-based servers or local computers.
“With Open Data Kit, grassroots activists can capture and export text, photos, video, audio, barcodes — even location. This imaginative software, observes one of this year’s Pizzigati Prize judges, ’empowers anyone with a little technical acumen, anywhere in the world, to collect data in regions where it’s hard to assess needs or document injustices.'”
Congratulations to Yaw and the entire ODK team, led by UW CSE faculty member Gaetano Borriello. The ODK project was incubated at Google Seattle – a hugely successful and high-impact collaboration, and a great demonstration “the power of the right platform.”
Read the announcement here. Learn more about Open Data Kit here.