The Fulcrum Focus

Fulcrum users often inquire if and when the Fulcrum mobile apps might support GPS tracklog functionality. We are focusing all our energy into building the best platform for structured data collection, and as such, this feature is currently fairly low on the priority list. One of the reasons we have not prioritized this is due to the fact that there are several excellent solutions already available for handling this.

There’s been a boom in the last couple years of big tech companies trying to reach to the periphery of the globe and bring Internet access to people without connectivity. Facebook is launching giant solar-powered drones with lasers, Google is floating balloons with antennae into the stratosphere, and smartphones are cheaper than ever.

This week we are attending the Institute of Transportation Engineers’s 2015 Annual Meeting, talking with the leaders in civil engineering design, traffic studies, planning, and design about methods for improving the data capture process. Field-based data is critical to get the latest information on transport infrastructure.

Does your company depend on email for team communication, collaboration and/or project management? Do you find email frustrating to keep up with? Do you wish your team could use something easy, faster, and more efficient?

Using with geojson.io
We are always on the lookout for quick and simple tips & tools for working with map data. One of our favorites since it was released back in 2013 is geojson.io. It is a fantastic web tool for quickly sketching out map data using the portable GeoJSON format. It also supports other common standards like CSV, KML, shapefile, GPX files from your GPS, and even saving data directly to GitHub repositories.

What happens after you have set up your app and collected information in the field? What is the best way to explore your data in a consistent and comprehensive manner? How do you make data more enjoyable to study?

The Fulcrum team creates company culture in a number of ways. One of the popular ways to toast one another is through GeoBooze, our Fulcrum + Slack-integrated drinks sharing form.

Two weeks back I was in Washington, DC at the GEOINT Symposium, the major industry event for the geospatial intelligence market, put on by the excellent USGIF. Each year there’s a growing number of companies with a primarily commercial focus, showcasing their tech for government users, which shows that the focus of the government community is more and more shifting toward off-the-shelf and consumer tech each year.

Here at Fulcrum, we often have people traveling for work to conferences, trade shows, presentations, and lectures. Upon their return to the office, they have to turn in the much dreaded expense report for approval and reimbursement. In my opinion, there isn’t anything worse you can do than making the employee do it over and over again because it didn’t include the complete trip details. If you use Fulcrum, I’ve created an expense app to create a hassle-free expense tracker.

Thomas Steele-Maley is the Director of Innovation at GEMS World Academy Chicago, and is working on bringing Mobile Learning to K-12 education.

UPDATE: This blog is from 2015, and it shows the old way of pushing data from Fulcrum into ArcGIS Online. Today, we recommend using Shared Views and the Feature Service output. See this post from January 2021 for details.

If you use Fulcrum to conduct facility inspections, perform building safety audits, or any number of construction-related applications, you’ll find plenty of places where you’ll want to make notes of measurements and dimensions. Today we wanted to highlight a handy mobile app for iOS that lets you document measurements clearly and consistently, and makes it easy to upload those to Fulcrum to include with full inspection data and Fulcrum reports.

With the ongoing widespread flooding and tornadoes affecting the southern United States, I’m compelled to write this post. It is directed towards the emergency managers and incident commanders in affected towns and counties and is meant to provide you with guidance on how to expedite disaster declaration using simple off-the-shelf technology. One of the chief goals of emergency managers should be to decrease the amount of time it takes for survivors to receive the assistance they require. This was my goal for five years while I worked for FEMA as a Geospatial Coordinator. Fulcrum will continue to offer our services to any emergency manager who needs assistance.

One of our core objectives with Fulcrum is to make it easy to work with your data once you’ve surveyed data in the field. There are several ways to get at your data after collection is complete, whether you’re performing QA/QC with the web-based map view, exporting raw data to several different file formats for export, or using our API to build your own custom tools. One of my favorite methods for working with my data is using what we call data shares, which allows for piping a live, on-demand version of an app’s data as CSV, GeoJSON, or KML formats.

Our latest update for Fulcrum on Android got some design updates and improvements to match Google’s Material Design specifications for layouts, look and feel, and interaction. You’ll see right away in version 2.13 that the app list is now presented as a drawer that slides out from the left. The form user interface has also gotten a facelift to conform to the Material standards.

Last week I attended an event with the US Geospatial Intelligence Foundation intended to showcase various cloud-based technologies for the GEOINT (geospatial intelligence) market, with speakers from HumanGeo, Agilex, DigitalGlobe, and more. The objective was to give quick lightning talks on cloud-based platforms enabling GEOINT capabilities, as part of the USGIF’s Innovation Task Force series.

Guest blogger J Allard is CEO and Founder of Project 529 and a Core Team member of the Portland Police Bureau Bike Theft Task Force. This post was originally published May 18th on bikeportland.org.

Guest blogger Danny Sheehan is a geographer and data science student with the Built Environment and Health Project at Columbia University.

House of Hope story
My name is Megan Smith and I am an outreach worker with the House of Hope CDC. House Of Hope is a nonprofit that provides a spectrum of housing and supportive services to people experiencing homelessness, with the mission of preventing and ending homelessness in Rhode Island. Toward this end, my role consists of collaborating with community partners to engage individuals not well-served by the current homeless service provision system. We’re specifically focusing on those who are staying on the streets and are experiencing significant mental health and substance use challenges.

Each year, more than twenty student researchers in the MSc Engineering Geology program at the Technical University of Munich take advantage of the Fulcrum for Education program to study and map landslides in the Austrian Alps. As GPS and GIS technology replaces paper maps and handwritten notes, these students are being trained to use modern field data collection tools and techniques in their landslide mapping courses.

Sending SMS messages to customers or clients while out in the field is an incredibly useful timesaver. When using Zapier with Fulcrum it is now possible to send SMS to predefined numbers or add a field to the bottom of your app and send your message to any customer. Whenever Fulcrum is synced it will trigger Zapier and push a SMS to your recipient. The best option I’ve found is using Twilio for this service. The use cases are endless, but here are just a few I imagine will be used:

Back in December, I wrote a blog on Managing Data Exports With SQLite. That article covers some basic relational database concepts, with particular regard to managing complex Fulcrum data exports. While we continue to receive support inquiries regarding best practices for managing exported field data, I thought I would continue this topic and provide some additional options for slicing and dicing your data with GDAL/OGR.

Skitch for photos
Many Fulcrum users have a desire to annotate photos, make circles, add text notes, or simply draw on existing photos. We are occasionally asked what sorts of tools are out there for annotation (or if that feature is available). Annotating photos often helps to identify something within a photo so there is no mistake in what is being identified (for example in safety audits, environmental surveys, damage inspections, etc…). In our opinion, the Skitch app beats everything on the market, hands down. It was recently purchased by Evernote, so it is safe to say that it is going to be around for a long time.

Maptime is an exciting new initiative with the mission of “opening the doors of cartographic possibility to anyone interested, by creating a time and space for collaborative learning, exploration, and map creation using mapping tools and technologies”.

Many local government agencies maintain awesome datasets of aerial photography, and publish that imagery under flexible or public domain license to enable easy use for many different types of applications. Fulcrum supports the MBTiles format for offline map packages, so it’s useful to know how to take the up-to-date, hi-res imagery available in GeoTIFFs for your project area, and build maps to use in the field. In this post I’ll walk through downloading and converting some aerial photos, then loading them into TileMill to create offline maps, including a video walkthrough on how to create them.

I’ll be out in Chicago this week for the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting. The AAG 2015 Meeting is one of the largest gatherings of Geographers in the world and brings together close to 8000 geographers from 60 countries. The program will cover a large selection of topics and looks to offer many interesting talks.

Recently, we’ve been expanding and redesigning our App Gallery search functionality, making it much easier to locate relevant apps for specific industries. In order to make new users aware of how Fulcrum could be used, we populate the Fulcrum App Gallery with sample apps. By doing this, we have found that almost all new users start with one or a few of these apps to get started, and on occasion, some improve them for their own use. The use cases of Fulcrum continue to surprise and delight us.

CRM systems abound on the internet these days, giving sales teams ample ways to log sales meetings, leads, customer interaction, and track business opportunities. Giving sales teams and management the visibility into operations and sales activity can bring incredible value to your organization if done well. However, a CRM tool is only as valuable as the data you put into your system. The more rapidly you have raw data and feedback from your field sales people, the faster you can make decisions to influence the customer or prospect interaction process.

The latest Fulcrum release includes some subtle enhancements for programmatically interacting with the mobile apps. We’ve introduced the fulcrumapp:// URL scheme for opening the app to create a new record or edit an existing record, with the option to pass in certain attributes via parameters.

Collecting rich media along with your survey forms is one of Fulcrum’s hallmark capabilities, allowing you to add detail to your collection workflow by using pictures and SpatialVideo.

Classification sets in Fulcrum let you create predefined hierarchies and schemas for classifying selection choice data into a standard format. This makes selecting a value from a long list of items incredibly efficient in the field. Classification sets are searchable and let you quickly ‘drill down’ to your intended value.

For mapping-based projects using Fulcrum as a data collection platform, GPS positional accuracy is paramount for many applications. These days there are quite a few devices available on the market to augment your consumer-grade hardware, an excellent option for cost savings that doesn’t require you to drop $5,000 on a piece of custom hardware (with crappy built-in software). You can buy specialty sub-$1000 receivers to get better GPS accuracy, but pair them up with purpose built location based apps like Fulcrum to get your work done.

A few weeks back we announced that we built integration tools on top of Zapier, to enable Fulcrum to be wired up with over 100 web services. This week the integration is now public for all Zapier users. Using Zapier, when you collect data in the field using Fulcrum, that data can trigger events to perform actions like sending emails, SMS alerts, and tons more.

Historic preservation
Historic preservation is a big deal in our cities these days. There’s an entire movement focused on the rediscovery and re-use of our urban cores. With any city of significant age, a key step to making the most out of our existing infrastructure is understanding, preserving, and in many cases reusing our historic sites in new and interesting ways.

This time last year, I was a FEMA employee working in the field of GIS. I was pondering at that time how to build a mobile GIS app that worked on an iPad or iPhone and could be deployed into the field with the Public Assistance teams (their current process involves paper and GPS units, and a lot of data entry done in hotel rooms). This mobile app would need to be extremely easy to use, be able to feed data into a database, and the data be viewable on a live map. This was a challenging proposition, but one that excited me.

The Fulcrum Development Team just returned from San Francisco following another great FOSS4G Conference. This was my second FOSS4G Conference, and my first time attending the North America event. As with FOSS4G Portland, the best thing about attending a conference like this is being surrounded by all the creative energy of folks excited about doing cool stuff!

The importance of time
 

The Fulcrum Development Team will be out in full force at the FOSS4G-NA 2015 Conference in San Francisco next week! The conference has lined up some great keynote talks as well as an impressive session schedule. We are hoping to schedule an impromptu Birds of a Feather (BoF) session for anyone interested in mobile field data collection and we are always more than happy to chat Fulcrum at any time. I will be Tweeting from the @fulcrumapp account, so be sure to join us and monitor the #foss4gna hashtag to keep up with everything else.

Accessing child record history
And, just in case you want to know why being able to see child record history from parent root level history:

A little over a year ago I put together a CARTO Webhooks guide and wrote a short blog post on CARTO highlighting how to use our recently released webhook push notifications to push Fulcrum record updates to CARTO tables. This post caught the attention of our friends at CARTO, which got some conversations going and launched our close working relationship.

SpatialVideo captured in Fulcrum often contains a wealth of “mappable” information. Coleman previously blogged about extracting video features for mapping in OpenStreetMap and after recently rediscovering geojson.io, I wanted see if I could come up with a simple way of quickly mapping features discovered visually in geojson.io.

We have a lot of Fulcrum customers that work in the fields of engineering and architecture, and when designing and constructing facilities of any size, it is imperative to be compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act design standards. In researching ADA compliance, I used the New England ADA Center’s ADA Checklist for Existing Facilities form to build a custom ADA Fulcrum app. The New England ADA Center is one of ten members of the ADA National Network, and publishes the checklists. I found their checklists to be extremely comprehensive. Because Fulcrum is so flexible, it took me about 30 minutes to build most of the Priority 1 checklist. You can see how easy it is to use in the video below.

Back in November, Coleman blogged about using Fulcrum’s SpatialVideo as a tool for collecting OpenStreetMap features. Since releasing SpatialVideo functionality, we have captured quite a bit of video coverage, particularly around Spatial Networks headquarters in the Tampa Bay area.

NOTE: This feature has changed since 2015 and this blog post is out of date.
The Fulcrum platform is built on top of several excellent open source components, including Leaflet and Mapbox.js, and we support the open GeoJSON format as the de facto data standard for web mapping. Your Fulcrum data is always available in GeoJSON format as an export or via data shares, and the web map allows you to view GeoJSON files as additional map overlays.

Our Fulcrum team is continuously trying to push the limits of mobile collection technology and build what we learn into new capabilities to help our customers. I am always on the lookout for commercial or consumer products that our customers could use in tandem with Fulcrum. Recently while shopping at Home Depot, I came across the new Ryobi’s Phone Works devices which function on both iPhones and Android phones (compatibility list).

We’re working on building some integration tools using Zapier, a great service that allows Fulcrum data to be integrated or sent to other services based on specific triggers. Zapier has existing tools to integrate with services like Salesforce, Dropbox, Google Drive, Basecamp, and many more – or to do simple actions like send emails, SMS messages, or push notifications.

Recently, we at Fulcrum came across the AccessLand initiative to provide open data and APIs for “our nation’s parks, forests, monuments, campsites, cabins, and tours.”

Fulcrum’s calculation fields enable some powerful collection capabilities. There can be many ways to configure and set them up, so this post provides some tips and tricks to help you get the most out of your data collection workflow.

Fulcrum’s SpatialVideo collection capability can be a valuable addition to data collection workflows, including mapping of rights-of-way, assets, pipelines, electric lines, environmental monitoring, and more.

I recently demonstrated to a Fulcrum customer how to georeference a floor plan of a mall for indoor use when conducting inspections of malls around the country. This same process can be used with Fulcrum for creating small offline maps. I’ve chosen not to use QGIS or ArcMap, but instead am using inexpensive or free software that anyone can learn to use in less than an hour.

Along with being able to share data collection surveys with field staff to collect data points, Fulcrum also has a powerful import tool for loading existing data into your account to send out to field, either for reference or for field workers to update. We put together a short how-to demo video showing how this can be done, using a shapefile to load some GIS data for editing.