Community Guidelines

 

Welcome to your CommCare Community of Practice! This forum is a wonderful source of information to answer questions related to your CommCare application and mobile technology deployment. To help establish some norms for our interactions here, and to ensure that you get the most out of this community of practice, we have put together some guidelines.  

We hope that this COP will be a rich source of information for everyone. We envision it to be a place where you can share: 

  • Dimagi will share new features and product improvements
  • Dimagi will share upcoming events or new resources
  • Technical questions about using custom and advanced features
  • Success stories, lessons learned, and best practices for app design, building, and implementation.
  • Challenges and success stories about how to build internal CommCare capacity in your organization.

  • Opportunities for collaboration on proposals, conferences, journal submissions, etc.

  • Coordination with other large INGOs to ensure orgs aren’t duplicating efforts in the same region.

     

Search for a topic before posting

Type your question or announcement into the search bar to see if a post already exists in this forum, the main CommCare user forum, or our help site-- the topic may already exist! If it doesn’t, post your topic here so that other COP members can respond. If you are asking a question, ensure it is specific, clear and complete.

Tell us what you’ve done so far

If you’re posting a question, let us know what you’ve tried so far. Have you looked at other resources and are still lost? If you’re working on an expression, what various syntaxes have you tried that haven’t worked? The more context you can give about what you have tried and what hasn’t worked, the easier it will be for the rest of us to help. 

Provide other appropriate context

Let us know if there is other context we need in order to help answer your question. Do users need to understand your workflow or user permissions? To answer a training question, will we need to understand the geography or physical limitations (e.g. mobile data connection, electricity, rough terrain) that your users face? Make sure to provide full context so the community can give you the best advice possible.

For technical questions, oftentimes sharing screenshots of the mobile app / CommCareHQ or directly copy and pasting expressions can help.

Share what you’ve tried so far

If you’re asking a question or posting a best practice, share what you’ve already tried, and why it didn’t work out. This will help others as they try to help diagnose your issue or give you advice of new things to try. Be specific about what didn’t work. If you received an error message, post the exact error you saw. Saying things like “I changed the display condition but it’s still not working” are not as helpful as saying “I changed the display condition to reference #form/dob_first_child but the question still shows no matter what date I enter for the First Child’s DOB.”

Post questions you have answered

Grappled with a tough issue this week and solved it? Share your experience! If you’ve faced an issue, chances are that other users will face the same thing. If you have some time, post on the forum about any challenges you faced that you were able to solve, too. This helps us all learn from your experience. For instance "I was really struggling on how to train my users on how to switch from Kobo to CommCare, but I used this guide and it worked so well!"

Safeguard protected data and information

While sharing as much information as possible will help us answer your questions better, please be sure to never share: 

  • Usernames and passwords
  • Protected user information 
  • Protected beneficiary data

Each project has its own set of data privacy guidelines that your organization enforces, so we will rely on you to adhere to your own guidelines. When in doubt, using test users and test data is always the best way to go.

Be kind and considerate of other members

The primary purpose of this group is to help foster collaboration and improve all of our own mobile deployments. Please treat other group members with kindness and civility, keeping in mind that this is space for professional collaboration. If you feel that a post is inappropriate or violate these guidelines, please flag to your Dimagi administrator.