Authors; Niraj Sitaula; Developer Advocate, Sam Mbuthia; Head of Community, Anthony Khaemba; Relationships Manager and Gareth Bowen; Senior Director of Technology
Our team is continuously working to enhance the Community Health Toolkit (CHT) framework. We can not do this alone, so, we are asking you to provide valuable feedback via a survey which is open now and available till 31st July. Your input is important for us to understand how well the CHT framework is meeting your expectations. This survey is one of the major ways for us to closely understand your experience in building and deploying CHT applications. We take your responses seriously and consider them in development of the CHT framework.
Last year, we collected a total of twenty-two responses from CHT application developers. 59% of those responses were collected in the month of April of 2021 and 41% in December 2021. Of each result, we further broke down the distribution into Medic and Non-Medic as shown in figure 1. As an open-source and transparent community, we are sharing some of our analysis on your feedback and our steps.
Last year, we asked you to rate how difficult you found the different stages while building a CHT application. Average of your responses are shown in figure 2 below. Our team worked on your feedback and we are glad to report that the releases, enhancement, and fixes had brought down the level of difficulty in multiple stages of CHT application development.
After the first survey in April last year, we introduced product learning calls. These calls were an opportunity for technical partners and community members to have an opportunity to both share their unique learnings from working with the CHT and opportunities to ask questions while getting direct support on any of the issues they were facing. These calls led to the exploration of new product features as well as faster resolution of issues. Some of the needs that were being addressed by the product learning calls are now catered to in the monthly CHT Round-up. The monthly CHT Round-up call brings together more community members working on various projects. However, CHT community organizations can request additional focused product learning calls if they require more direct support or would like to share their learnings at a much deeper level than they would be able to in the Round-up.
Our learnings and next steps
From last year, we have worked hard to increase the number of open resources available to the community. We added tutorials that provide a foundation for app developers who are starting out building CHT applications. We also improved and updated existing documentation to better serve the needs of the community by providing more detailed context and adding code snippets. We continue to work on example workflows and code that provide a starting point for app developers to work from.
Evidence suggests that learning is improved when multiple senses are engaged. To this end, we are working on video tutorials that will provide community members with a visual and audio walk through of the existing tutorials. Along with this, we intend to continue working on multimedia modes of delivery of open-resources that will make it easier for the community to engage with all content.
Our roadmap also includes plans to incorporate French resources and to continually work toward greater inclusivity in our content and community. Our goal is to use your feedback to strengthen the CHT framework and the community. We humbly request you to collaborate with us to achieve our goal by providing your feedback to the survey. Similar to our approach last year, we are using Google Forms to collect the survey and require you to login to your google account to fill the survey. This will give us an opportunity to contextualize your feedback and follow up directly with you.
Please share this survey with other CHT application developers you know. We’ll be publishing the results in a few months and we will ensure to keep the community posted on steps that will be taken to move forward with your suggestions.
If you’d like to discuss this on the CHT community forum, here’s the associated post.