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<html lang="en-us">
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<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Flocktracker</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="styles.css" type="text/css"/>
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="ft_logoxl.png" >
</head>
<div id="topbar"><span id="logo_topbar"><a href = "http://flocktracker.mit.edu/"><img src="ft_logoxl.png"></img></a></span>
<span id="bigtitle">Flocktracker</span>
<span id="rightmenu1"><a href="http://flocktracker.mit.edu/#team" style="margin-right:85px;">Team</a></span><span id="rightmenu1"><a href="http://flocktracker.mit.edu/#application">Application</a></span><span id="rightmenu1"><a href="http://flocktracker.mit.edu/#about">About</a></span>
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<div id="imgctr"><img src="info.png"/></div>
<div id="headertext">All about Flocktracker</div>
<div id="subtext">The Flocktracker Android-based application takes advantage of smartphones and tablets to enable data collection in the field, in a quick way, with high spatial and temporal resolution. The technology is flexible and adaptable. Originally designed for collecting data on minibus systems in megacities of the Global South, it is suitable for a wide-range of field-based research initiatives. Our goal is to enable researchers from a range of backgrounds (e.g., citizens, academics, government officials, private industry) and with a variety of purposes (understanding housing conditions, safety concerns, etc.) to create inexpensive, accurate, and robust data sets, capitalizing on the benefits of technological innovations. The below sections will elaborate further on the application, its potential, and our past.</div>
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<div id="headertext">What sets Flocktracker apart?</div>
<div id="subtext">Flocktracker aims to overcome the limitations of current, pen and paper survey methods, enabling field-based surveys to be deployed with greater ease: faster, more accurately, and in a user friendly manner that generates highly contextual data sets. Unlike other surveying apps, Flocktracker is capable of handling complex survey structures (tree structures with jumps between questions depending upon the answer of a question) and different kinds of questions, like multiple choice, check-box, open questions, “take a picture” questions and “order the list” questions. All of this is customizable via a markup language created just for handling surveys, so the user is able to customize the project s/he wants to work in. The resulting output enables highly detailed analyses, combining any range of variables, such as vehicular crowding levels (via counts), on-board surveys of satisfaction levels, as well as spatial and temporal data, like time, position, elevation and speed.
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Our goal is to make this app a universal surveying and tracking app, suitable to be adapted to handle long and complex socio-demographic surveys, but also user-friendly enough to allow nearly anybody with a computer and a smartphone to quickly create small surveys for topics of interest. Flocktracker is not just for social scientists and transportation engineers but anyone interested in engaging their urban environment!
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<div id="headertext">Increasing urban awareness</div>
<div id="subtext">Flocktracker’s ease of deployability and rapid output analytics enables anyone from analysts and traffic engineers to interested citizens to easily and effectively operate surveys capable of generating substantial data, effectively and effortlessly, for urban analyses.
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<div id="headertext">Tapping Flocktracker's potential</div>
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<div id="subtext">In short, Flocktracker takes the “black box” of urban analytics and aims to make it highly accessible. Because the data collected are geospatially and temporally validated, falsification of data is significantly harder. We provide a simple, downloadable tool to vet data, ensuring the quick production of quality data that can be easily validated; we hope this tool can be used to empower citizens in generating knowledge about the places they care about.
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<div id="subtext">In short, Flocktracker takes the “black box” of urban analytics and makes it highly accessible. Because data is geospatially and temporally validated, falsification of data is significantly harder to accomplish. While data quality is typically reliable in much of the developed world, having a simple, downloadable tool to vet data, particularly in the rapidly-developing world, allows for the quick production of quality data that can be used to validate or, more importantly, stand up to technocratic decisions based of obfuscated, closed data.
>>>>>>> FETCH_HEAD
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Beyond its technical capabilities, the app’s use can motivate groups to action. Our early pilot applications, working with university students and other volunteers in Dhaka and Mexico City, demonstrated how field research teams quickly and effectively organized to engage local communities on topics of public interest, such as bus route map development and understanding public safety concerns. In that sense, Flocktracker moves beyond just serving as a data collection medium towards becoming a force for social change.
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<div id="headertext">A brief history of the applicaton</div>
<div id="subtext">Flocktracker began at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning [link] through research supervised by Associate Prof. Chris Zegras and supported by the Future Urban Mobility Integrated Research Group [link], under the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) [link]. Led by Albert Ching and Stephen Kennedy, Master of City Planning (MCP) students at the time, in collaboration with a local social advocacy organization, Kewkradong [link], the initial work tested basic app functionality (developed in MIT App Inventor [link]) for tracking buses and conducting simple on-board surveys and passenger counts in Dhaka, Bangladesh in early 2012. Those pilots eventually led to a larger project involving additional MCP students and Kewkradong volunteers and resulting in the production of the city’s first publicly available minibus map of the city, released in May 2013 [link]. The technology was since adapted, with additional support from MISTI Mexico and in collaboration with UTL [link], to examine public safety perceptions on minibus routes in Mexico City. Those field experiments led to a complete native rebuild of the app and backend technologies, improving functionality, operability, stability, and usability. Improvements will be ongoing and your use and feedback of our tool would be much appreciated.
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<div id="subtext">This content is copyright 2014, MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Mobility Futures Collaborative, and Urban Launchpad MX.</div>
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<div id="imgctr"><table align="center"><tr><td><a href="http://www.dusp.mit.edu"><img src="partner_logos-01.png"/></a></td><td><a href="http://www.urbanlaunchpad.org/"><img src="partner_logos-02.png"/></a></td><td><a href="http://smart.mit.edu/"><img src="partner_logos-03.png"/></a></td><td><a href="http://smart.mit.edu/research/future-urban-mobility/future-urban-mobility.html"><img src="partner_logos-04.png"/></a></td><td><a href="http://misti.mit.edu/mit-mexico"><img src="partner_logos-05.png"/></a></td><td><a href="http://www.grupoprodi.com/"><img src="partner_logos-06.png"/></a></td></tr></table></div>
<center>Some of our past and current partners.</center><br>
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