Happy World Water Day! Share a water point!

I’ve always wanted mWater to be a social network for water, sanitation, and health. This week, that effort got much stronger with a few key updates in the mWater Surveyor app.

In the old fashioned world of monitoring and evaluation, the burden of proof was placed on why data should be made public. However, with the new, porous data environment where we are all connected in the real and virtual world, the burden of proof is on why data should be kept private. At a base level, people deserve to have access to data collected about them, their communities, and their water. At an organizational and management level, we can all make faster and better progress if we work together than if we silo ourselves apart in hard drives and file cabinets.

mWater was designed to collaborate with data. We created our apps and data portal to make sharing feel easy and safe, building in three levels of privacy:

1. Sites mapped in mWater can be marked Private if the data collector feels there is a significant need to not let anyone outside their organization see it. This is ideal for households and security risks. Private data can still be anonymized and shared as indicators in the mWater Portal.
2. Sites can be marked Protected if the person or organization creating them does not want anyone else to change the key information like name and location, but others can update status and refer to the site in their own forms over time. This is the most used protection level. This is built for collaboration. Your organization can always disaggregate your own updates and data from others’ and yet you can build on the knowledge of others over time.
3. The third setting is Public, where anyone can update the location and name as well as collect data based on the site. This setting is ideal for public mapping projects like a national water point census.

Now, sites that are Protected and Public can be shared to social media with the new Facebook and Twitter icons in each site page. This means your team can update their online friends about their progress monitoring a site. You can keep funders connected with their assets through a Facebook Groups page. Also, sites now have permanent URLs so you can post a site page to a report, an email, or a funding campaign like GoFundMe. Custom users can pay mWater to create site pages unique to their organization, with their logo and special fields like user stories and budget tracking.

These updates bring monitoring sites like water points, sanitation facilities, schools, and health clinics into the virtual world. This allows for more opportunities to collaborate with your work. Most importantly, this allows communities where these sites are an easy access point to be educated of and involved in your work.