Share residents' pothole reports without publishing their phone numbers

A roads maintenance team in Accra (an illustrative client) collects pothole reports from residents through an ArcGIS Survey123 form, and every report carries the resident's phone number. The city wants the reports on its public map at once and downloadable as open data, while the numbers stay with the team's Roads Maintenance group. The team has to decide how the reports are shared in ArcGIS Online.

A municipal roads team in Accra (an illustrative client) works in ArcGIS Online (June 2026 update). Residents report potholes through the team's survey form, built in the ArcGIS Survey123 website (July 2026 release). Every report lands in the survey's hosted feature layer, which the team's GIS officer owns: a point for the pothole, the resident's description of it, and the resident's phone number in the field phone.

The form's own settings are already in place and are not part of this task: anyone may send a new report without an account, and submitters may only add new records (Only add new records in Survey123), so nobody can see, change or download a report through the form. The form sends each report through the view of the layer that Survey123 created for submissions when the survey was published; that view serves the form and nothing else.

In ArcGIS Online an item nobody has shared opens only to its owner and to members who may view other members' content, such as the organization's administrators. Sharing opens it, and every field it holds, to chosen groups, to the Organization or to Everyone (public). A layer's export setting, on its item's Settings tab, is Allow others to export to different formats.

What the city has decided

Apart from the organization's administrators, nobody outside the team's Roads Maintenance group, to which the GIS officer belongs, may be able to read a phone number, whatever app they open the data in. The group already reads the numbers through a view of its own, shared with that group alone.
The city's public map, which anyone opens without signing in, must show each pothole as soon as it is reported.
Reports come in through the form alone: nobody may add, change or remove a report through the public map.
The city's open-data rule: anyone who opens the data its public maps show in the ArcGIS Online website may export it there to a file, such as a CSV file or a GeoPackage.

What to hand in

Choose one option for each of the four decisions: who the survey's own layer is shared with, what the public map draws, how editing is set on the layer the public map draws, and whether others may export that layer to a file. Where an option quotes a setting, the words are the setting's label in ArcGIS Online. Each decision settles one of the four points above, and the four have to hold together. Your justification beside each choice is recorded and is not scored.

What to submit

Submit: Choose one option per decision and enter any requested sizing figures. Explain each choice in the form.

Objectives

Choose the sharing that keeps a sensitive field inside one group
Choose what a public map draws when its data holds a field the public must not read
Set editing on the public map's layer so the public cannot change the reports
Meet an open-data rule without letting the protected field out

Constraints

These are where the teaching is. Read them twice.

Work with ArcGIS Online's own items and settings, as of the June 2026 update
No phone number may be readable outside the Roads Maintenance group, apart from the organization's administrators
The public map shows each report as soon as it is sent
Reports arrive through the survey form alone, and the form's settings are not part of the task

Graded requirements

Sharing of the survey's own layer
What the public map draws
Editing on the public map's layer
Exporting from the public map's layer

Modelled on Esri's own guidance, by title: ArcGIS Online's 'Create hosted views', 'Allow data exports from hosted feature layers', 'Share items' and 'Manage hosted feature layer editing' (June 2026 update), the ArcGIS Survey123 page 'Publish a survey', and Esri Software Security & Privacy's 'Limiting Access to Public Survey123 Responses' (version 2.1, July 2025), which says the source survey layer should never be shared and only its views should. The skill sits under Managing and Sharing Content in Esri's GIS Fundamentals Foundation 2026 exam guide. The Accra roads team is illustrative; Kharita is not affiliated with Esri.