The Fulcrum Focus

We recently wrapped up our spring “All Hands” week, the semi-annual event when the entire staff descends on SNI headquarters in St. Petersburg, FL, for presentations, planning, and team-building. (And So. Much. Eating.)

Globally, more than 2.3 million people die each year as a result of occupational accidents or work-related diseases — that’s more than 6,300 deaths per day.

Successful enterprise asset management is key to reducing costs and increasing productivity and profitability for any organization.

 Field data collection is by no means limited to the confines of terra firma! NOAA Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary has been successfully using Fulcrum to help city, state, and federal agencies in offshore data collection, accessing, and sharing marine enforcement data across California.

Successful data collection starts with a good survey. How you design your questions will have a tremendous impact on the way data is collected, processed, and analyzed. We’d like to share some of our best advice on building a proper field data collection survey.

You have probably noticed that many companies have switched from paper to mobile forms, whether it was while checking in at the doctor’s office on a tablet or signing for a package with a stylus.

We’re fans of keeping it simple when it comes to data modeling. While Fulcrum is flexible when it comes to making changes, it’s always helpful to start simple and add complexity as you need it when building your apps. One common and powerful use case for data relationships is creating lookup tables for common datasets to be referenced in your apps. Fulcrum’s Record Link data type allows you to establish these relationships across apps to maintain consistent, standardized data for lookup fields.

We’re out at the SaaStr Annual again this year, a yearly gathering of companies all focused on the same challenges of how to build and grow SaaS businesses. SaaS really came into its own as a style of software in the early to mid-2000s with the rise and expansion of the internet as a new vector for delivering software to users. Salesforce was probably the earliest and best-known example of a new model of hosting software on behalf of customers (now known as “the cloud,” then it was an “ASP”). While it’s no longer considered new to deliver software as a hosted service, the benefits of Software as a Service, such as cost savings, scalability, and ease of use, are still surprisingly poorly understood by many buyers of software.

As a geospatial intelligence and technology company, Spatial Networks is dedicated to advancing geographic literacy in education. This commitment aims to enhance students’ understanding of our rapidly changing world.

When we initially launched our integration with DroneDeploy on its App Market, we had other plans for expanding it. Our goal was to make drone imagery more accessible for fieldwork and ground-truthing through Fulcrum.

What is human geography

Human geography has been around as long as, well, humans. But our study of “human geography” as a concept is relatively new, especially among the geospatial/GIS community.

Since we introduced Fulcrum in 2011, the team at Spatial Networks has worked continuously to improve the platform and scaling Fulcrum to become the industry leader in field data collection, as well as to mature as both geographers and software developers. We like to think we’re succeeding on both counts.

At Spatial Networks, we strive to be your go-to source for geospatial data and the industry leader in mobile data collection technology. We continue to improve the Fulcrum platform and help our customers all over the world discover new ways to save time and money and streamline their business processes.  With another exciting and productive year in the rear-view, it’s time to take a look back at Fulcrum 2017 highlights while we review the last 12 months here at Spatial Networks!

At our core, Spatial Networks is a geography company. From building geospatial technology products to collecting, organizing, and analyzing geodata, we eat, drink, and breathe geography. It’s sobering to learn that, for many of our customers, Fulcrum often provides their first exposure to the wonderful world of Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

We just concluded our 2017 All Hands week, a semi-annual event where every Spatial Networks employee meets up at the company’s headquarters in St. Petersburg, Florida for a fast-paced week of projects, teamwork, and planning for the future.

Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria caused widespread destruction across Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Now, engineering faculty and students from several U.S. universities are using this disaster as a learning opportunity.

Earlier this month, we held our first-ever user conference, Fulcrum Live 2017. At this event, we hoped users could come together to share their experiences and learn from new ways organizations are using Fulcrum to streamline business processes. Judging by the feedback we received, it was a resounding success! It took our team many months to plan and coordinate the event, so we are grateful to those that came. We had nearly 100 attendees descend upon the city of Boston for a day of talking, storytelling, networking, and enjoying great food. We especially want to thank our speakers for taking the time to share their stories with the audience.

Most people understand that the ability to use a piece of software doesn’t equate to the ability to build that piece of software. Using a computer has been an essential skill in the modern workforce for some time, but the ability to make a computer useful by programming it to do what you want is an entirely different skillset. Computer programming is a language and like any language is best learned when you are young. So why aren’t we doing a better job of combining kids and coding – the primary language of the tools that we work with?

Fulcrum Live is an all day event co-located with the International Conference for Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G). Join Team Fulcrum, our partners, and user community on Tuesday, August 15th in Boston, MA for a full day of presentations, case studies, technical talks, and networking! Located at the Boston Seaport and World Trade Center, this fast-paced single day event runs the day before the FOSS4G sessions and is free for conference attendees!

Mobile widgets on Fulcrum

The latest updates for both iOS and Android bring support for Fulcrum mobile widgets! Widgets allow you to quickly access frequently used Fulcrum apps on your device. While they function slightly differently between mobile platforms, widgets help to streamline your workflow for faster field operations.

Poachers beware! Counter-poaching organizations have a new app at their disposal to identify, track, and destroy elephant poaching networks thanks to Fulcrum.

In the software business, a lot of attention gets paid to “shipping” as a badge of honor if you want to be considered an innovator. Like any guiding philosophy, it’s best used as a general rule than as the primary yardstick by which you measure every individual decision. Agile, scrum, TDD, BDD — they’re all excellent practices to keep teams focused on results. After all, the longer you’re polishing your work and not putting it in the hands of users, the less you know about how they’ll be using it once you ship it!

We are thrilled to support the FOSS4G 2017 Conference as a Gold Sponsor this August in Boston! The annual Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) brings together the largest global open-source geospatial software global community. This event gathers developers, users, decision-makers, and observers for a week of immersive learning and networking.

This year was a great one for Fulcrum. Since 2011, it’s been our mission to make communications and data capture more seamless between the office and the field, and the growth in diversity of our customer base has proven that it’s a challenge worthy of solving — that organizations in many verticals are faced with poor back-and-forth process with field operations.

With Black Friday behind us, it’s officially the holiday gift giving season! Do you want to give a unique gift to your favorite maphead or geo geek? We know that finding gifts for map geeks can be quite tricky. So, a few of us on the Fulcrum team have compiled a holiday gift guide that your geo geek is sure to love. Ranging from $15 to $300, we’re sure you’ll find something within your price range that will be treasured for years to come.

Last week at Columbia University, hundreds of scholars, policy makers, environmental researchers, and geographers sat down to discuss how geography can be used to solve major world problems at this year’s Geography2050 Conference. The theme for the conference, “Envisioning a Sustainable Planet”, focused on the use of GIS tools, data, and novel approaches to aid in the protection, preservation, and conservation of our planet for future generations.

This is part 3 in our series about feedback loops, improving data quality, and reducing the time between response and action. In this part, we’ll identify ways to directly improve feedback loops and highlight various tools which can help you communicate information into actions that will help you achieve your goals.

This week we’ve got some interesting links from around the web — tips on using Slack more efficiently with a large group, personal time management, and notes on the latest powerful update to Workflow (the excellent iOS app).

I had the opportunity to represent Fulcrum at the inaugural DroneDeploy Conference in San Francisco, CA last week. One of the goals of the conference was to “focus on real-world drone deployments across industries driven by people”. The conference had people in attendance from an array of industries including end users, software providers, and developers interested in folding aerial survey data into applications.

Cory and I are in Toronto for this year’s GIS-Pro conference hosted by URISA. URISA always puts on a good show with a wide array of speakers, this time with heavy representation from Canadian cities and towns, as well. URISA’s Ontario, Alberta, and BC chapters came together and built a great program for planners, GIS analysts, and management, with plenty of talks on best practices and what’s new in GIS.

Being “productive” requires the right thought process. Your mental state is much more important that the tools you use for getting things done, though many productivity resources are overly focused on the toolbox (rather than how the tools are applied). This week we’ve got a few links on ways to think differently about “knowledge work”. Enjoy!

It seems like machine learning is either hitting its stride as a real “thing” these days, or is at a particularly high point in the hype cycle. The advances happening in this AI / ML space are fascinating. I think the Big Tech Companies are onto something with real-world applications that are neither pie-in-the-sky science fiction or vaporware. This week we’ve got a few interesting things in that vein.

What’s new in workflow
Here are some of the interesting things the Fulcrum team has found from around the web related to workflow, data, and analytics. Enjoy!

At no other point in history has geography played such a critical role in virtually every aspect of our lives. From the long-standing traditions of map making and understanding how the physical environment is organized, to the contemporary explosion of GIS, GPS, and other geospatial analyses and techniques, Geography now permeates every aspect of our daily lives.

This is a guest post from our partners at RESPEC, an integrated consulting and services firm with over 230 full-time employees and annual revenue over $30 million.

On August 24th, we rolled out some significant updates and additions across all of the major components that make up the Fulcrum platform — iOS, Android, and the web application. You can always find a summary of the updates on our Release Notes page, but since this is a big one, we wanted to take some time to review some of the new features that are now available.

Coleman McCormick speaker notes – IAOO 2016
Thanks for visiting! These are the notes and links from my talk at IAAO 2016 — Automating Field Data Collection. Below you’ll find links referenced or mentioned in the talk, the slides for download, and contact info to get in touch.

Later this month we’ll be at the International Association of Assessing Officers (IAAO) Conference, talking in-depth about what appraisers and assessors can do to automate their field data collection processes. We talk with hundreds of customers with diverse arrays of projects, and so frequently the underlying pains in dealing with data are the same, regardless of industry. My talk will cover some thoughts on best-practices to designing data workflows, actionable things you can implement to make your fieldwork more efficient, and how to maximize costly field resources (your people) to create “evergreen” data you can use over time.

Last month, our longtime partner, CartoDB, rebranded as CARTO and launched their latest product — CARTO Builder. This rebranding and new product launch signify their commitment to the field of Location Intelligence. While the CartoDB Editor made it easy to visualize map data, CARTO Builder provides additional tools for simplifying data analysis and building out data dashboards. Manually-constructed SQL queries and coded applications have given way to widget-based application development. Data exploration and analysis can be accomplished in an intuitive way, without ever having to write any code.

“All purposeful behavior may be considered to require feed-back. If a goal is to be attained, some signals from the goal are necessary at some time to direct the behavior.” —Norbert Wiener, father of Cybernetics & Control Systems

While our engineers are hard at work building a flexible platform that suits the needs of our diverse user base, we often receive feedback from users exploring the software (or potential customers) and requesting very specific features, totally unique to their workflow.

This is part 5 in our series on spreadsheets and data visualization. In this part we’ll cover how to do more with data once it’s in Google Sheets, such as integration with other services, BI tools, and more. Be sure to also check out part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4 of the series.

In the days of pen and paper collection, data was something to collect, transcribe, and stuff into a file cabinet to be stored for a minimum of 5 years (lest those auditors come knocking). With advances in digital data capture — through all methods including forms software, spreadsheets, or sensors — many organizations aren’t rethinking their processes and thus, haven’t come much further. The only difference is that the file cabinet’s been replaced with an Access database (or gasp a 10 year old spreadsheet!).

I recently came across an essay entitled The Servitude Bubble, by Umair Haque, regarding technology and the booming “Sharing Economy”. It’s an interesting read, with the author driving home the point that the tech industry is currently investing too much time and talent building and unleashing eyewateringly, painfully, mind-numbingly trivial apps which are largely based on creating armies of servants.

Geolocation data in UTM
We posted a while back about a technique for capturing and converting coordinate systems on-demand using calculation fields. That method used the excellent proj4js library to take given latitude / longitude pairs for a Fulcrum record, and calculated the correct values for the projection of choice. This post gives a quick similar method for doing the same thing, but for the popular UTM coordinate system (Universal Transverse Mercator).

This is part 4 in our series on spreadsheets and data visualization. In this part we’ll cover charting and exploring your data with Google Sheets. Be sure to also check out part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 5 of the series.

Using Fulcrum to prevent elephant poaching
Recently IFAW sponsored the tenBoma project, an effort to improve reporting, tracking, and enforcement to counter wildlife crime in Kenya. Fulcrum is playing a key role on the ground to help the Kenyan Wildlife Services (KWS) catalog events associated with poaching activities. For the last several months, KWS personnel have been using Fulcrum for on-the-ground event tracking and counter-poaching investigations. During a recent trip to Voi, Kenya, near the Tsavo East National Park, I had to pleasure of working with KWS personnel and a team from Agile Analytics Group to assist in workflow development and field collection process. During the trip we refined the Service’s workflows, and how Fulcrum could better be used to support operations.

Fulcrum and Tableau
Just as Fulcrum specializes in being a data collection tool, Tableau shines as an analytics and visualization platform. The last time we posted about Tableau, Katrina showed us some basic data processing steps to get a Fulcrum CSV Data Share into Tableau. In this post we’ll go through another method, using GeoJSON/CSV Data Shares with a Tableau Web Data Connector (WDC).

We’ve worked very hard to design Fulcrum so that it’s as easy as possible for our customers to use. In doing so, we’ve managed to “hide” a lot of the complexities around form & database design that many other platforms expose their users to. By dragging and dropping fields in our form builder, users are essentially creating a complex database without even being aware of it. Here are five important form building tips, in no particular order, that can assist new users when building their first form.

Calculation fields are powerful for form customization and used heavily by many Fulcrum users. Since their launch last year, we’ve seen adoption take off and customers are now using them in thousands of different ways.

This is part 3 in our series on spreadsheets and data visualization. In this part we’ll cover sharing and publishing to the web from Google Sheets. Be sure to also check out part 1, part 2, part 4, and part 5 of the series.