For the past two years, we’ve been workign to support an amazing group of kids in Kolkata, India known locally as the “Dare Devils” to help teach them how to use mobile phones to map social issues in their community. Their inspiring story which features the incredible work of Prayasam has recently been featured in a documentary called the Revolutionary Optimists which just aired publically on PBS on Monday.

To help promote the message that children can be power change agents in their community, the film makers Nicole and Maren, have launched a project called Map Your World to allow youth groups from around the world to use mobile phones to map issues that concern them in their own communities. The website for the project is close to launching but for now the following trailer provides good background on the project:

Map Your World from Grainger-Monsen Newnham on Vimeo.

Behind the scenes, Map Your World will be powered by formhuband ODK Collect. To do this, we are working to provide the MYW team with formhub API’s that will allow them to build the MYW on top of the formhub as a service. This will allow them to focus on creating powerful vizualizations while formhub will handle all the form submissions, user permissions and data storage. We think this a model that will make sense for a lot of organizations who want to leverage the power of mobile data collection but create an experience more adapted for their project needs. If you interested in doing the same and want early access to our API’s please let us know.