The Fulcrum Focus

Update for 2023:
We are thrilled to announce that Fulcrum has entered into a definitive Commercial Provider agreement with Esri™ to leverage their technology stack. This partnership brings together the leading solution for field inspections and data collection with the top geographic information systems (GIS) platform, which is used by clients in virtually every industry that requires location-related data, mapping, and analysis.

The latest updates to the Fulcrum Android and iOS mobile apps include some great new functionality that we are excited to announce. While every update includes subtle improvements, behind-the-scenes performance enhancements, and bug fixes, this release includes some great new features for truly personalizing your mobile apps, including new custom app icons.

A couple of weeks ago, Bryan and I were out in Flagstaff, Arizona for the annual meeting of OFWIM, the Organization of Fish and Wildlife Information Managers. Over the last several months, we’ve been doing a webinar series for OFWIM’s membership; a group which consists of technical staff, researchers, and GIS analysts working at federal, state, and local levels on issues related to fish and wildlife mapping and data management.

In the past few weeks my colleagues have showcased examples of building applications on top of Fulcrum, utilizing our open source libraries and the Fulcrum API:

Before joining the Spatial Networks team, I worked for five years at FEMA as a Geospatial Coordinator. I spent my days collecting disaster-related data, analyzing it, and publishing informative maps. Senior leadership at FEMA and state governments then used these maps to support decision-making.

So the hotly anticipated Apple Watch is now a reality. Many thought Apple might do something drastically different, but they didn’t — their device looks surprisingly similar to prior art in the space from Google and Samsung. It’s a watch with a few productivity functions beyond timekeeping, has almost none of its own onboard sensors (save the HealthKit and activity tracking sensors), and not-too-impressive battery life. The physical constraints of the wristband form factor don’t provide space for making significant innovation beyond the territory of their competitors at this point. If they made it super slim, it’d have less battery life and no sensors. The face can’t be too big, but needs to be big enough to interact with buttons and text. To do anything cool you need radios and sensors, which make it bigger. Marco Arment covers these engineering and design tradeoffs in his excellent write up.

Jason and I were in Portland, OR last week for the annual FOSS4G conference. FOSS4G (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial) is the largest global gathering of developers, users, decision-makers and observers focused on open source geospatial software.

Many Fulcrum users are working indoors, conducting facility inspections of inside spaces. Within large facilities there may be multiple floors and hundreds of rooms to visit to inspect equipment, perform quality checks of plumbing and electrical, or observe the quality of build-outs for future repairs. Even though these types of work happen indoors without access to accurate GPS signals, you can still use Fulcrum’s mapping capabilities to create facility maps and geolocate your data on a reference background.

The latest updates to the Fulcrum web interface include some exciting new features and enhancements. The most prominent change is the new “App Dashboard” page. We’ve streamlined the main Fulcrum landing page, moving the administrative tools to the new App Dashboard page and making the core tools more prominent. Clicking on the app name now takes you to the App Dashboard page, where you can access the administrative tools along with a high level snapshot of activity within that particular app.

We’ve been hard at work the last few months creating an amazing new capability for field survey in Fulcrum using video capture, on both Android and iOS platforms, and now we’re announcing a new feature!

This week is the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, one of the largest geographic sciences organizations in the world, with members from the academic and scientific communities, business, and government from over 60 countries. AAG’s annual meeting has been held every year since the Association’s inception in 1904, providing a platform for members to discuss the latest in geographic and cartographic research and GIScience.

Patrick and I just returned from a week in Tunisia at the GCT 2014 Conference, where we met regional GIS organizations. We also connected with mapping companies from across Africa, discussing advancements in geospatial technology and industry applications. Throughout the event, we spoke with professionals specializing in aerial imagery, remote sensing, surveying, and field-based incident reporting. Many industries showed strong interest, including electric, gas, and water utilities, as well as rail and transportation. Law enforcement, tax assessment, and several other sectors were also heavily represented in discussions on geospatial solutions.

This is a guest post from Mitchell Sipus, interdisciplinary Community Planner specialized in designing creative solutions for the world’s most complex environments, including this project for qualititative and ethnographic research in Ethiopia.

We just released an update to add several new tools for visualizing data in the Fulcrum web interface. Layers, which includes what was previously referred to as maps, will greatly enhance the data review experience through the Fulcrum web app. We also added a few tools to make finding locations in the web app easier and faster.

As a follow-up to Last week’s announcement regarding the addition of layers functionality, today I want to walk through using offline map layers in the Fulcrum web app. Utilizing offline map layers in the web app allows the user to review data in the same manner as the data was collected.

In the latest release of QGIS (2.2 “Valmiera”), the free and open source desktop GIS software, there’s a great new feature to support one-to-many data relationships. Since we recently launched parent-child & repeatable records in Fulcrum, we wanted to write up a quick overview on how you can use QGIS with data collected in Fulcrum to do visualization and analysis for free on the desktop. Read on to learn how to create data relationships and do more using your data in a GIS.

One of the best places to go for exploring the data collection possibilities of Fulcrum is our App Gallery, which includes many pre-built app templates for different types of field surveys, across dozens of industry sectors. Today I’ll be discussing three of our latest featured additions to the gallery catalog to demonstrate the flexibility of Fulcrum to meet a wide variety of requirements: traffic sign inventory, erosion control monitoring, and construction safety.

With the release of our management dashboard design improvements a couple weeks ago, we also introduced a new panel for administrators monitoring activity in their Fulcrum organization, to be able to view field updates as they happens. The Activity Feed panel, visible on the right side of the main dashboard, shows a chronological view of activity going on with your users.

New app-building tools

We just released an upgrade to add some nice new tools for building apps in Fulcrum. When creating digital surveys for field inspections or checklists, the data types you use to create your data collection apps are key to data integrity, as well as speed and efficiency while working in the field. This new update adds two new field types to the App Designer: a time selector field and a checklist field, for quick “Yes/No” style questions. We’ve also added a much-requested ability to do range validation on numeric field types (e.g. “value should be between 1 and 10”).

You may have heard more about stormwater recently than you’ve ever heard about it before. Stormwater has been in the news quite a bit – particularly in the region of the Chesapeake Bay – because of tighter government regulations, new fees, and because stormwater is one of the largest sources of pollution in the Bay and its contributing waterways. Stormwater runoff picks up oils, sediment, and litter from impervious surfaces (such as parking lots) every time it rains. If this pollution isn’t captured by stormwater management infrastructure (and much of it is not) it makes its way into the Chesapeake Bay.

I was recently invited to give a guest lecture presentation on mobile data collection for a ‘GIS In the Sciences’ course at Rensellaer Polytechnic University in Troy, NY. This course introduces upperclassmen from various majors to the fundamentals of Geographic Information Systems. My presentation was 5 weeks into the course, so the students already had a pretty good grasp of the basics. They were familiar with using QGIS to display, edit, and analyze their geospatial data.

Before joining the Spatial Networks team, I spent the last six and a half years working as a GIS Analyst/Developer for a full service engineering firm on projects spanning the globe. One of the cool things about working in the Technology Solutions group for a multidisciplinary consulting engineering firm is that you get to be involved in a wide variety of projects across many different disciplines. Engineers are involved in everything, from transportation projects to environmental impact assessments, utility network design to water and wastewater system modeling. In my experience, this level of variety in a GIS job is rare.

As part of yesterday’s update to support complex relationships between data types in Fulcrum, we also added another new powerful capability that makes offline fieldwork even easier for teams.

Today we’re announcing some major new features in Fulcrum. First, we’ve added a new repeatable field type that enables parent-child (i.e. one-to-many) items within records. A long-requested feature from many of our users, this new capability will enable you to create much more advanced data collection surveys and inspection forms, produce higher-quality data & geodatabases, and streamline the collection process to save time and reduce error from the field. Along with the addition of repeatable data types, we’ve improved the data exporter to support several additional formats, created a brand new advanced data importer, and released major updates to the Android and iOS apps. Together, these new features add significant power to the Fulcrum platform for doing field work. Here’s an overview of each new addition.

We on the Fulcrum team work hard to make collecting your data a breeze. And we’re always thinking of ways to make Fulcrum more valuable and powerful for you, our customers. To that end, we are pleased to announce the release of webhooks for Fulcrum.

Keep track of changes with full version history

In addition to yesterday’s announced data management improvements with the launch of full-text data searching and filtering of content, we’ve also included another powerful capability for managing field service work: data versioning.

Over the last few months, we’ve been working hard to bring Fulcrum for iOS to the next level, making data collection even faster and more powerful. The app has been rebuilt from the ground up with tons of features and improvements all around, as well as a whole new refreshed look and feel. Announcing Fulcrum 2.0!

Previously on the blog, we’ve discussed the concept of field reports and groundtruthing on top of raster data (like satellite imagery), and the simplicity of accomplishing this in Fulcrum. Using Fulcrum’s native support for MBTiles-based map tile packs, any raster can be turned into a portable tilecache you can load onto mobile devices in Fulcrum, allowing you to annotate on top of the map using custom-designed forms.

Earlier this year, Applied Geographics (AppGeo) and Spatial Focus launched a three-month pilot for an address reference system in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The project covered St. Croix, St. John, and St. Thomas for the Office of Lieutenant Governor Gregory R. Francis. During the pilot phase, the team assigned 1,500 of roughly 120,000 addresses across the three main islands.

To recap, a couple of weeks ago we attended the CFGIS Workshop (Central Florida) in Orlando, a regional event bringing together GIS staff from many Florida city and county agencies, as well as those from consultancies and mapping companies. There was a great lineup of talks and presentations highlighting many local Florida projects.

Modern civil engineering should include technology! An increasingly rapidly changing digital world demands a furious pace of innovation in our engineering environment. SMEC, or Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation, is one of the leading engineering and development consultancies in the world. Providing multidisciplinary consulting services in engineering, project management, environmental science and development activities, SMEC has been engaged in assignments throughout the world for over 40 years.

One of the coolest features in Fulcrum is building offline map layers for mobile mapping. Access to a local map tile cache untethers you from the need for network connectivity to get reference map data when in the field. Using the map design software TileMill, along with some geo data or imagery, you can make your own custom map layers to load onto mobile devices for your Fulcrum field teams. In this post, I’ll walk through using some free and open resources to get your own satellite or aerial photo data, build some offline map tilesets, and load them onto your mobile devices for field use.

We just completed a major upgrade to the Fulcrum web platform, strengthening our cloud infrastructure and improving performance for our global user base. These improvements ensure greater reliability, security, and scalability as more teams rely on Fulcrum for field data collection.

In our previous post, we shared our experience at JIFX, the experimental event series organized several times a year by the Naval Postgraduate School at Camp Roberts, CA. JIFX provides a unique setting for field experimentation, bringing together industry, academia, and government to test and refine technologies in real-world conditions. Unlike traditional demonstrations, this event places engineers and their systems side by side, enabling direct collaboration and hands-on integration. Proving success—or uncovering failure—in this environment helps stakeholders see technologies in action while allowing engineers to push the limits of their software, hardware, or systems. As an engineer and designer of Fulcrum, participating in this kind of field experimentation is invaluable, providing firsthand insight into how the platform performs in dynamic conditions and where improvements can make it even more effective for field data collection.

We are back in the office following a great week in California for our second experience at Camp Roberts for Joint Interagency Field Exploration (JIFX). The objective of JIFX is to bring together people from industry, government, and academic institutions to field test hardware, software, and ideas to explore the potential of new capabilities in addressing various challenges. The environment is explicitly experimental, and promotes great collaboration between participants. I spent the week working closely with FEMA operations on the Disaster Recovery Center (DRC) survivor registration process, experimenting with ways to make the survivor assistance process more efficient and field-friendly, while also remaining the most helpful for stressed survivors in need. Zac and Coleman participated in various additional experiments involving Fulcrum.

This Friday, Alex and I will travel to Fort Worth, TX, for the 78th Annual NACo Conference and Exposition. We will exhibit in booth 728, so if you’re attending, make sure to stop by and visit us. As most NACo attendees know, GIS and government data collection play a crucial role in effective county operations. GIS benefits nearly every county department, from public works to elections, emergency response, and law enforcement. Leveraging powerful GIS tools improves efficiency, reduces costs, and enhances overall productivity in various government functions. Many counties already use Esri software regularly, but they could maximize their GIS capabilities even further.

Last month, FEMA Blue 1 attended a 2013 Joint Interagency Field Exercise (JIFX) hosted by the Naval Postgraduate School in Camp Roberts, California. NPS conducts a biannual RELIEF conference that fosters innovation and cooperation toward disaster response and is attended by representatives from academia; private industry; state, local, and federal government; non-profits; and international organizations.

Connecting people to safe drinking water in Liberia with Fulcrum

Having recently used Fulcrum to map over 15,000 potential new customers of the water utility in Liberia’s capital Monrovia, the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program is now using the collected data to help connect more people to safe drinking water, and is working on using Fulcrum to improve the customer database of the Liberia Water and Sewerage Corporation (LWSC).

Last week, Tony and I spent the week out at Camp Roberts in California, testing Fulcrum in the field with FEMA for disaster relief needs as part of the RELIEF field experiments.

Humanitarian aid and assistance agencies are working all over the world to help developing nations prepare for and respond to disasters. We are proud to share that Fulcrum is actively being used by such organizations for disaster planning.

When we released the first generation of Fulcrum for Android nearly a year ago, we had no idea that it would quickly become the primary platform for our users. It became clear that our Android client needed to be the best it could in order to enable our users to collect data easily and efficiently. Since its initial debut on July 31st of 2012, we have released 32 updates to the client, adding new features and increasing performance and stability. Today marks a big milestone in that trend.

We love hearing feedback from our users, and were very pleased to see Brandon Freeman’s excitement about Fulcrum when he reached out on Twitter. Brandon is a Civil Engineer with TREKK Design Group, and has been using Fulcrum for multiple projects.

We’re making rapid progress in all areas of developing on Fulcrum as a platform and we are excited to see the level of interest from around the world.  We’ve got potential partners wanting to develop private-label apps powered by Fulcrum as well as a growing collection of DIY users taking the power of Fulcrum in directions we had not imagined just a few months ago.  This is all very exciting.  On top of that, we’re rolling out the latest iPhone version later this month (the iOS Universal edition as well).  We’re a tad behind on Android but I’m confident it will be at parity with iOS by mid-year 2012.

Later this week we’ll be at the Esri Federal GIS Conference showcasing Fulcrum, along with some other Spatial Networks capabilities and data to a host of federal agency representatives, NGOs, GIS professionals, and others.