SchoolTool 2010 Plan

Review of 2009 Goals

Overall, SchoolTool experienced steady progress and achieved most of our goals for 2009.

1. Release SchoolTool 1.0 in April as a basic, functional student information system, and support schools and teachers independently deploying and using it through the rest of the year, including a 1.1 release in October.

• We met this goal, notwithstanding a short delay in the second release (which we called 1.2).

2. Package and release CanDo so that it can easily be used outside of its Virginia base. Help with support as necessary to make their pilot and likely larger state wide fall deployments a success.

• We now have CanDo Ubuntu packages on Launchpad, which are used in a five county pilot of locally hosted CanDo installations in Virginia.

3. Do fit and finish on the SLA Intervention System, package it, support pilot deployments in Philadelphia and promote it elsewhere.

• We successfully incorporated the features developed at SLA into SchoolTool 1.2 and moved SLA onto the standard trunk SchoolTool. Expanding use in other Philadelphia schools was shelved because the district superintendent driving the idea left his job.

4. Raise an additional EUR 50-100,000 in outside funding.

• SchoolTool and CanDo took in over $20,000 in outside funding.

Additional Commentary on Fundraising

While we fell short of our fundraising goal, the potential for substantial outside funding of SchoolTool is clear, and we learned a lot about where to find it. As many of our current contacts are in the US, the severe fiscal crisis in state and local government had a significant effect on our efforts, although stimulus will also bring some opportunities in 2010.

CanDo Development Funding:

• $5,000 from Arlington Public Schools, Office of Career, Technical and Adult Education
• $5,000 Virginia Department of Career and Technical Education (CTE)

Arlington and the state CTE also did considerable local training, produced documentation for pilot sites, and promoted CanDo and SchoolTool at several state and national conferences and fora.

I helped David Welsh and other staff at the Arlington Career Center draft a National Science Foundation grant proposal in the neighborhood of $250,000 over three years, a substantial portion of this devoted to further development of CanDo and SchoolTool. It seemed promising – there is specific funding for exactly the kind of workforce training they do – but was rejected primarily for having a weak research component.

In October, David was contacted by the Director of Grants and Special Projects at Northern Virginia Community College, who were peripherally involved in the first proposal, with an offer to take a much more active role in another proposal in 2010. With much greater high-end grantwriting experience and a stronger connection to research, we feel like we have a good shot at it in 2010, and David is very motivated to make it happen.

Additionally, the U.S. Department of Education will be giving out $100 million in stimulus grants as part of an “Investing in Innovation Fund” which potentially is well suited to further CanDo funding.

Moodle & SchoolTool Integration:

• $10,000 from Escondido Charter School (funds from West Foundation grant)

Escondido Charter School is a hybrid “virtual” program in California. They use Moodle extensively and need a custom SIS that works with Moodle and can be adapted to the needs of a virtual school (e.g., “courses” that go on indefinitely with students completing at their own pace).

They funded $10,000 for planning and web services infrastructure (to make SchoolTool talk “mnet,” Moodle’s XML-RPC based web services), with clear intentions to continue in the fiscal year starting in July for at least $20-30,000 more devoted to SchoolTool/Moodle interoperability, before California’s extreme budget crisis simply sucked all the air out of their budget. This work was done with Matt Oquist as the contractor.

Calendar Development:

• EUR 1,000 from Ronald van Engelen

Mr. van Engelen has contracted with POV for approximately EUR 1,000 in improvements to group calendar management. This work is being done right now by POV.

Some Near Misses:

I had fairly serious conversations with a Providence charter school that is already using SchoolTool for calendaring about moving to SchoolTool as their SIS, investing some of the money they’d otherwise pay in licensing in customization. Ironically, this deal was also done in by the financial crisis, but instead of them having too little money, they got a big stimulus grant for technology that they then spent on a commercial SIS.

Douglas Cerna and I helped Joy Olivier write a grant proposal to do SchoolTool customization as part of a scale up of the Ikamva Youth program in South Africa. That project was not funded.

Conclusions:

A mission-critical enterprise application like SchoolTool has a far higher adoption hurdle to jump than your average open source tool, however, a very high proportion of users have the expectation and capacity to pay for some customization and development, or at least the motivation to try to secure grant funding for that work. This often comes before they start using SchoolTool.

My proper role seems to be supporting grant writing by schools and other institutions and connecting clients with contractors. It doesn’t appear to be necessary or desirable to create a “SchoolTool Foundation” to apply for grants itself.

Goals for 2010

1. Get SchoolTool into Ubuntu 2010.4.

The main steps are:

• Get SchoolTool working with the new Zope packages in Ubuntu. We’re aiming to get that done before the end of the year;
• Consolidate remaining Zope dependencies not yet in Ubuntu and get them into Ubuntu;
• Get SchoolTool into Ubuntu.

SchoolTool 1.2 was a feature release, 1.4 (2010.4) will be very stability focused so getting the relatively short list of “must have” new additions ready early for Ubuntu package freezes should not be a problem.

2. Get at least one significant multi-school deployment outside the US.

Being somewhat US-centric the past few years has gotten the project onto its feet, but the project’s mission and future lie elsewhere. Experience up to this point indicates that one school at a time distribution by open source osmosis is likely to be a very slow process. We need to work with government and NGO’s to start picking up schools in chunks.

3. Raise an additional EUR 50-100,000 in outside funding.

Have another crack at this year’s missed goal.

Budget for 2010

Overall, it is similar to this year with one major exception, described below.

1. Through April 2010, continue with current structure.
2. Put out an RFP for a grant program totalling up to EUR 50,000 at the beginning of the year with the goal of findingone or two multi-school SchoolTool deployments, preferably in the developing world. This would achieve several goals:

• Finding good partners for making SchoolTool better suited to the developing world’s needs.
• Not being dependent on other people to fund the above.
• Subsequently demonstrating to government and other funders that SchoolTool use and development is a good investment.
• Formalizing existing relationships, building public relations and local publicity around the grant.
• Promoting SchoolTool to the growing world of open source philanthropy in education and the developing world.
• Giving people who are considering promoting or using SchoolTool locally an incentive to act.
• Potentially building local developer capacity.
• Giving us both a check-point about overall interest in SchoolTool.

The grant would either be for in kind development by our current development team, or perhaps by local developers IF they could demonstrate Zope 3 experience, for example, Upfront Systems in SA or Douglas Cerna working locally in El Salvador.

We would put out the RFP in January and probably have a two stage application process to allow us to give people early feedback about the estimated cost of various features, potential developers, etc. I’d also like to pull in some outside people to help judge submissions.

The development work would start in May and continue throughout the year as necessary. It might include some travel and developer training costs, but overall it would be up to the applicant to demonstrate that they have the capacity to administer the deployment, user training, etc. themselves.

We may want to pay for a formal review of the funded initiatives.