​Farewell from Sam Adams, RHoMIS consultant

Sam Adams
Sam works on the RHoMIS tool, building surveys and looking after user experience. He grew up in England, Zimbabwe and South Africa and has a background in agroecology and project management.

Editor: In this article Sam Adams shares some of his achievements and highlights from his experience at ILRI. Sam has been a consulting member of the RHoMIS team for the past two years. We wish him all the best in his new venture.

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It is with both sadness and gratitude that I am finishing at ILRI this week. I have been a consultant with the RHoMIS team since April 2018 and it has been a most rewarding and enjoyable two years.
 
I set up the blog in 2018 and have collated monthly articles since then, so I thought I would write one last personal article to say goodbye.
 
Since I joined the team, RHoMIS has grown from strength to strength. It is an absolute delight to stand at this moment and reflect on the widespread improvements to the RHoMIS offering.

Although hired primarily to write ODK code and support survey users, I have also contributed to the branding and communications overhaul at RHoMIS.
 
A fresh visual identity was launched in 2018 with an updated logo, new website and Twitter account.
 
Improving internal systems has also been part of my contribution, as we have migrated to more digital forms of record management and communication, using channels such as Trello, Slack and Whatsapp.

I introduced a cloud storage system that has helped our team to synchronise work and improve version control of survey and analysis files.

Sam Adams on a maize farm in the UK, 2019

One of my highlights of the two years at ILRI was a field visit to Uganda in 2019. Meeting colleagues in the Kampala office and at the training location in Kamuli was a great joy and added the human element that had been missing from my usual remote working.

Likewise, the gathering in Wageningen in November 2018 brought together users of RHoMIS from around the world. It is these face-to-face interactions that deepen the connections and stir creativity and problem-solving in a way that I judge to far exceed online collaboration.

Another major output from my time at ILRI has been the creation of a metadata database. This captures metadata and contextual indicators from the surveys including number of households interviewed, location data, and modules used.

​Additional indicators capture how many male and female enumerators were trained, average length of the questionnaires, and the average number of daily interviews. This data is essential as RHoMIS ensures quality control and continues to improve the offering to users.

I was also the driving force behind RHoMIS DIY, a new offering that we launched in January 2020. This free package includes training guides, survey ODK files and R analysis scripts.

​The DIY uptake has exceeded all of our expectations. The files are downloaded by new users on a nearly daily basis, expanding the community of practice of RHoMIS users and facilitating our mission as an open-source data for development project.

Through the DIY offering, we have connected with new NGOs, scientists, and students across the world. This is very exciting and perhaps one of the achievements that I am most proud of.

Sam with colleagues and interviewees in Uganda, June 2019.

I am grateful for my immediate colleagues Jim Hammond, Mark van Wijk, Leo Gorman and Dan Milner. Thank you for the collaborative co-creation we’ve achieved, for the laughter and humour, and for imagining a more connected world of data for development.

I am pleased to say that I will be continuing in my trajectory towards a more connected world, as I take up a project manager role at Agricompas, an agricultural data analytics company. Based in Oxford, I will be overseeing a pilot project in Colombia with sustainable palm oil and rice growers, in collaboration with CIAT, another CGIAR centre.
 
I wish RHoMIS, ILRI and our community of practice every blessing.