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Fieldwork

Door-to-door fieldwork as a team, with Grupo

How a team organizes door-to-door canvassing with no signal, without losing track of who covered which street and without an administrator reading what is not theirs.

September 28, 20262 min read

Canvassing, a census, a sales route: door-to-door work is geography. There are streets and house numbers, people who have been visited and people who have not. A generic form knows none of that. It knows questions and answers, not places.

Every answer pinned to the address where it was collected

In Asterisco, a note written at someone’s door carries the coordinate of that address. One simple convention handles the rest: put the house number at the start of the note’s title. Walking down the street, Radar lists notes from nearest to farthest, so the map becomes the street’s own coverage list.

The Rua Harmonia folder with notes 170, 163, 156, 150, 143 and 137, each with a short result and the addressNote 170 opened, with its address, coordinate and a map of the spot
The street’s folder on the phone of someone in the field. The title is the house number; the text is the result of the visit, from “Answered everything” to “House closed, dog at the gate”. Sample data.

In the portal, whoever coordinates sees the same notes on the map. Notes close to each other group together and the number says how many are at each spot, until zooming in separates one house from the next.

The Asterisco portal: the list of the survey’s ten notes on Rua Harmonia beside a map of Vila Madalena with the notes grouped
The Rua Harmonia survey as the administrator sees it. Sample data.

No signal, no blocking

Side streets and apartment buildings are the first places data signal drops, and exactly where fieldwork most needs to keep going. Each person writes offline. Syncing happens when the connection returns, and not before.

An administrator with clear limits

Grupo gives whoever runs the fieldwork a way to invite the team, see what everyone collected, and remove someone who left, without that person’s content staying on their device. The administrator still does not read a member’s personal folders and does not create reminders on anyone else’s phone. What belongs to the group, the group sees. What does not stays private.

The Grupo console, People tab: four field researchers and the administrator, with each person’s role, join date, number of notes and last note date
The Grupo console shows who is on the team, how many notes each person wrote and when the last one was. Counts and times only: the console never shows where anybody has been. Sample data.

If two people cover the same street, nothing is lost

Two team members wrote about the same house before syncing? Both versions stay visible to whoever reviews them, and neither is silently discarded. Duplicate coverage becomes the reviewer’s decision, not lost data.

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