Uwazi Connection
Uwazi is an open-source documentation tool developed by HURIDOCS. It is a flexible, web-based database application designed for human rights defenders to manage their collections of information, including documents, evidence, cases, and complaints.
Uwazi allows organizations to aggregate, in a central repository, data collected by their members or partners. Tella users connect to their organization's Uwazi instance, download forms (called templates), fill templates as many times as they need (even if they don't have internet connectivity), and upload the data. Organizations can then curate, organize, and publish their data directly from Uwazi.
Similarly to all other server connections(Tella Web, Google Drive, Nextcloud and Open Data Kit), connecting to Uwazi enhances the security of data collected on Tella by:
- Allowing users to collect data directly inside Tella's encrypted container
- Ensuring that data is sent directly from Tella to Uwazi, without having to rely on a third-party tool or app
- Allowing users to back up their data on a remote server, to lower the risk that data is discovered on their mobile device
- Ensuring that organizations can preserve important information even in the event of device seizure or destruction, and can organize it to use for research, advocacy, or accountability processes
Testing Uwazi
You can test Uwazi using this Demo instance.
When to use Uwazi
We recommend Uwazi to organizations that need on-the-ground users to collect data in a structured manner through forms.
Uwazi also allows project managers to easily organize, analyze, visualize, and publish the collected data. It is especially powerful because of its database allows making relationships between entities, which helps connect data points (such as incidents, perpetrators, and victims) to emerge patterns. Uwazi is also great to collect data in many different languages and to facilitate collaboration between teams.
Uwazi does not have an official mobile app, so by integrating Uwazi and Tella, you can leverage Tella's encryption and offline capabilities and take full advantage of Uwazi's abilities to organize, search, download, visualize, and publish information.
Here there are some pointers on Uwazi may be particularly suitable to your use case:
- You need to make the data collected publicly accessible on a website.
- You need to establish relationships between data points.
- Data must be contained in structured database registers.
- You need to clean up, edit, organise and curate the collected data.
- You need to quickly search, find and analyse data.
- You work in a multilingual environment.
- You work in a collaborative environment with multiple users and different profiles.
- You need to preserve information in a secure way over the long term.
You can learn more about Uwazi on Uwazi's official documentation. HURIDOCS is a great friend of Horizontal, so if you have questions about Uwazi or would like us to connect you to the HURIDOCS team, contact-us.
If you need help figuring out if Uwazi is best for your use-case, read our guide or contact us!
Configure Uwazi on a server
The HURIDOCS team offers 2 alternatives on how to set up your uwazi server:
- Self-hosted: Share this comprehensive administrator guide with your system's administrator for step-by-step instructions on how to install Uwazi on your server, configure backups, and set up advanced features.
- Hosted by HURIDOCS: HURIDOCS offer hosting packages as a service. Free hosting services (up to a storage limit) and a trial version of Uwazi are available for human rights organizations. Reach out to HURIDOCS for more details about the service.
Model Your Data
An Uwazi collection is made up of Entities. An entity has Properties which are the fields that Tella users will fill to collect data. Entities can hold Primary Documents and/or Supporting Files and some properties that are defined by administrators on the Uwazi server when they create templates. A template is an empty form that can be filled as many times as needed; once a template is filled, it becomes an Entity.
You can read here about the properties that are available on the Uwazi server and how to model your data and create your templates. For the moment we only support properties and functionalities that have been flagged as high priority by Uwazi users. If you need other properties, contact us.
If Tella users download a template that has properties that are not supported in Tella, those properties won't be shown in the app. However, users will still be able to submit the entities, and admins will be able to access these entities, including all the properties that were filled, without any problems.
Available Properties
Property or Feature | Tella Android | Tella iOS | Tella Android FOSS |
---|---|---|---|
Primary and Supporting Documents | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Plain Text | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Numeric | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Single Select | ✔️ |