Introducing Open Forms!

The problem

Ever been to a conference where you set up a booth or attempt to get quick feedback by running around the ground and felt the awesome feeling of -

• Captive portal logout
• Timeouts
• Flaky Wi-Fi drivers on Linux devices
• Poor bandwidth or dead zones
• Do I need to continue?

While setting up the Ubuntu booth, we saw an issue: The Wifi on the Linux tablet was not working.

After lots of effort, it started to work, but as soon as we log into the captive portal, the chip fails, and no Wi-Fi is detected. And the solution? A trusty old restart, just for the cycle to repeat. (Just to be clear, the wifi was great, but it didn't like that device)

We eventually fixed that by providing a hotspot from mobile, but that locked the phone to the booth, or else it would disconnect.

Now, it may seem a one-off inconvenience, but at any conference, summit, or event, this pattern can be seen where one of the issues listed listed above occurs repeatedly.

So, I thought, there might be something to fix this. But no project existed without being reliant on Web :(

The solution

So, I built one, a native, local first, open source and non-answer-peeking form application.

With Open Forms, your data stays on your device, works without a network, and never depends on external services. This makes it reliable in chaotic, un-reliable, or privacy first environments.

Just provide it a JSON config (Yes, I know, trying to provide a GUI for it instead), select the CSV location and start collecting form inputs.

No waiting for WiFi, no unnecessary battery drains, no timeouts, just simple open forms.

The application is pretty new (built over the weekend) and supports -

• Taking input via Entry, Checkbox, Radio, Date, Spinner (Int range)
• Outputs submissions to a CSV
• Can mark fields to be required before submissions
• Add images, headings, and CSS styling
• Multi-tabbed to open more than one form at a time.

Planned features

• Creating form configs directly from the GUI
• A11y improvements (Yes, Federico, I swear I will improve that)
• Hosting on Flathub (would love guidance regarding it)

But, any software can be guided properly only by its users! So, If you’ve ever run into Wi-Fi issues while collecting data at events, I’d love for you to try Open Forms and share feedback, feature requests, bug reports, or even complaints.

The repository is at - Open Forms GitHub The latest release is packaged as a flatpak.