In our previous post, we shared our experience at JIFX, the experimental event series organized several times a year by the Naval Postgraduate School at Camp Roberts, CA. JIFX provides a unique setting for field experimentation, bringing together industry, academia, and government to test and refine technologies in real-world conditions. Unlike traditional demonstrations, this event places engineers and their systems side by side, enabling direct collaboration and hands-on integration. Proving success—or uncovering failure—in this environment helps stakeholders see technologies in action while allowing engineers to push the limits of their software, hardware, or systems. As an engineer and designer of Fulcrum, participating in this kind of field experimentation is invaluable, providing firsthand insight into how the platform performs in dynamic conditions and where improvements can make it even more effective for field data collection.
The simulated EOC at Camp Roberts
Experiment whitepaper hypotheses
Each participant at JIFX submits a short whitepaper outlining an experiment to conduct during the week-long event. This document describes the technology, product, or capability and defines the primary objective to achieve during testing. The submission serves as a proposal or hypothesis, guiding the participant’s approach to setting up and executing experiments. Participants run experiments individually or collaborate with others to maximize the effectiveness of their testing. Over several days, they deploy their technology in the field and begin running various trials. Some tests produce outstanding results, while others expose weaknesses that require further refinement. The goal is to push technology to its limits, identify failures, and gather critical feedback for improvements.
Beyond planned proposals, the JIFX model encourages spontaneous “ad hoc” experimentation to explore new possibilities. As participants observe other tests, they identify potential points for integration or collaboration. They combine technologies on the spot, creating new workflows and innovative solutions in real time. Last week, we conducted multiple ad hoc experiments with Fulcrum, each unique and valuable in different ways. These spontaneous trials helped demonstrate new applications for the Fulcrum platform and revealed promising opportunities for further development.
Crowdsourced imagery extraction and groundtruthing
On the first day at JIFX, we met up Luke Barrington from DigitalGlobe, who had brought along some recent satellite imagery for the area around Camp Roberts. Luke is one of the founders of Tomnod (now part of DigitalGlobe), a crowdsourcing platform for building tasks and games around identifying features in imagery. It presents the contributor a portion of imagery and asks you to tag things you see – structures, wildfires, vehicles & trucks, deforestation – all sorts of things that may be visible in imagery. The crowd’s contributions are then piped through an algorithm to generate a consensus for occurrences of those features. It’s an incredible platform for rapid response, especially interesting with current imagery for fast feature extraction. And it can be ridiculously fast. Luke even hooked our task up to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to get things geotagged even faster.
Using satellite imagery
Our experimental use case was simulating groundtruthing of damaged structures from near real-time satellite imagery; think earthquake or wildfire, creating widespread damage. We wanted to quickly get a current dataset of structures in the area, seed those locations into Fulcrum, then get some boots on the ground with the Fulcrum mobile app to field survey each location with a damage assessment app. Beginning with the imagery of Camp Roberts, Luke set up a Tomnod task to identify structures in the image. Putting this out to the Tomnod crowd, over 2,000 locations were tagged in less than an hour, giving us a good dataset of structure locations.
Using Fulcrum’s data API, we piped these locations into a damage assessment app, so volunteers with smartphones could visit each site to survey potential damage to the buildings. As a result, we took information from fresh space-based imagery, to extracted data, to groundtruthed information from the field all within a couple of hours. The capability we demonstrated could be incredibly powerful to first responders, emergency managers, or other users looking to gain insight into current on-the-ground situations rapidly, and with limited resources.
Remote deployment for field operations
One experiment deployed a Fulcrum server on the “EOC in a box,” a portable emergency operations center. Buddy Barreto from the Naval Postgraduate School built the system and configured a virtual machine to support Fulcrum operations. The local instance ran alongside virtual servers that hosted ArcGIS software and remote sensing tools for advanced data processing. The Fulcrum web application operated within the experimental center, allowing teams to sync and merge field data without cloud access. Maintaining connectivity in disconnected conditions ensured operational flexibility and improved data management for emergency response teams working in the field. A local umbrella Wi-Fi network linked EOC systems and enabled mobile devices to sync crucial data in real time. The entire server system functioned for three days on a Honda generator that consumed five gallons of fuel efficiently. This setup supported fully, partially, or completely offline operations, ensuring adaptability in unpredictable emergency response situations.
XLSForm compatibility
Since OpenDataKit is used in a lot of institutions for making forms and surveys, there was interest in adding interoperability between ODK and Fulcrum. Many folks have already built forms with the XLSForm spec — an Excel-based form design logic read by ODK tools — so Zac put together a simple conversion tool where you can drop in an XLSForm Excel file, and have it output the compatible form structure to import into your Fulcrum account. The code is open source on GitHub, and you can even give it a try to convert some forms yourself.
These are just a few of the cool experiments that went on during the week, and doesn’t count the numerous other conversations and ideas that happened along the way. The ad hoc field exploration environment provided by JIFX gives us an opportunity to link Fulcrum in with interesting tools others are building, to become a multiplier for those looking for field tools and better data. Thanks again to the NPS crew that puts the JIFX series together, it’s always a worthwhile time to get out there to learn and experiment.