SchoolTool 2010 Development Grants

The SchoolTool project is excited to announce an initiative to provide 50,000 Euro in custom development grants to help schools, government, and organizations in the developing world to pilot and deploy SchoolTool for computer based school management. These grants will be funded by by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth.

Background

What is SchoolTool?

SchoolTool is a project to create free and administrative software for schools around the world, particularly in the developing countries. SchoolTool was conceived by Mark Shuttleworth, who remains the primary funder of the project. Much more information about SchoolTool is available at http://schooltool.org

SchoolTool is also a testbed for using free and open source software as a vehicle for philanthropy which empowers it users and leverages the combined investments of donors, local government and businesses, open source hackers, and NGO’s.

SchoolTool was originally a project of the Shuttleworth Foundation but is now independently managed with a separate budget.

Current Situation

SchoolTool 1.0 was released in April of 2009, as a school-level student information system. That is, each instance of SchoolTool tracks the school and class enrolment, attendance, grading, various report generation and calendaring for one school. See schooltool.org for a much more detailed description of SchoolTool’s current functionality.

As of February 2010, the primary deployments of SchoolTool have been in the US, the largest being an installation of SchoolTool and a competency tracking module called CanDo in several career and technical centers supported by the state of Virginia.

This work has established a solid base for SchoolTool’s next phase – deployments in the developing world.

While SchoolTool has no costs associated with licensing, school administration is a complicated task, and even mature systems often require substantial customization, particularly if being adapted to the requirements of a new country or school design. At this stage in SchoolTool’s development, any substantial deployment in a new context will require some up front costs to ensure SchoolTool meets local requirements.

Goal of the Grant Program

The purpose of this grant program is to provide in-kind developer support to defray the cost of additional development necessary to deploy SchoolTool in target markets.

What are the target markets?

Anyplace outside the US, Canada, Western Europe, Japan and Australia.

Grant Value

Up to EUR 50,000 for the 2010 calendar year, probably divided between two sites, but the number of sites may vary depending on the scope of accepted proposals.

The majority of the award will be in the form of in-kind development by experienced SchoolTool contractors. We currently have three full time developers working on SchoolTool. From May 2010 through the end of the year, the project’s top priority will be supporting the grant sites.

Grant proposals can include funds to be used locally to support requirements gathering, testing, feedback and focus groups with local teachers, administrators, parents, students and other stakeholders. Also some funds can be allocated for training local developers to create and maintain further work and maintenance to SchoolTool.

Additionally, SchoolTool will fund an independent review of both the development and deployment at each grant site.

Who is Eligible?

Local, regional or national government, public and private schools or non-school educational programs, non-governmental organizations (NGO), or government and/or an NGO in collaboration with a commercial vendor.

For example, a local government working with a vendor to provide ongoing support and promote use in other sites may be preferable to simply a local government with little ongoing support capacity. If in doubt, ask.

Scope of “Development”

With a few exceptions noted below applicants may propose any type of additions or modifications to SchoolTool’s programming to make it suitable for local use. One of the reasons for this grant program is to get a clear idea of what actual users require, so we don’t want to pre-emptively limit the scope. Typically, however, this would include import and export scripts to work with existing data systems, reports, both printed and electronics and routines for delivering them to higher authorities, and custom data fields for local requirements.

In particular, we expect governments to require more data tracking about the school as a whole, for example, more detailed tracking of information about a school’s physical plant, and perhaps more detailed information about staff such as level of training, years of experience, etc. But again, we would rather have potential users tell us their specific requirements than try to guess.

What this Grant Does NOT Cover

This program is for software development and some closely related expenses. It is not for hardware, translation, user training, or the ongoing cost of deployment. These are the responsibility of the grant recipient. If translation into the local language(s) is necessary, this can be done by the grantee using free tools at Launchpad.net, with technical assistance by the SchoolTool team.

The purpose of the grant is to defray startup and customization costs. Once that is done the site will handle ongoing costs and requirements in the same way they would any other deployment of open source software.

Technical Requirements

Full technical requirements for SchoolTool can be found at http://book.schooltool.org

Quick summary:

• One SchoolTool server instance (software) corresponds to one school.
• Multiple software servers can be run on one physical server.
• SchoolTool is easily installed on Ubuntu Linux; grant recipients will be required to deploy SchoolTool on Ubuntu Linux.
• It is possible and often recommended to deploy SchoolTool as the only service on a virtual server.
• Users interact with SchoolTool via web browser.
• SchoolTool can be used on a single PC in a school office with the same machine acting as client and server.

Three Facets of a Proposal

There are three facets of an proposal for this grant:

• scope of user sites;
• scope of functionality;
• breadth and depth of support.

Proposals will be evaluated on a holistic rubric that emphasizes a balance between the scope of sites, functionality, and support resources. Bigger is not better if the necessary supports are not in place. A smaller, successful deployment that can serve as the foundation for further growth is more desirable than a big deployment with mixed results.

Scope of Sites

The one hard requirement is that the grant should include a pilot deployment of more than one site. Bigger is not necessarily better, if size outstrips local support capacity. If we select one large scale project, we might keep the second one smaller to avoid swamping our own resources. In many cases a first year pilot will proceed plans for a wider deployment. Whether or not this is necessary depends on local circumstances.

Sites should serve primary and/or secondary aged students. They do not have to be schools per se. Other educational programs such as enrichment programs are acceptable.

Scope of Functionality

SchoolTool has a range of functionality across several modules, including grading, attendance, competency tracking, and calendaring. It is expected that most deployments will focus on a relatively narrow scope. This might include an entirely new, if fairly simple, module.

In most cases, unless the capacity of local support is very high, the scope of sites and functionality should be inversely proportional. That is, a small number of sites using a relatively wide scope of functionality, or a deployment aiming at an eventually large deployment focusing on relatively few tasks.

Depth and Breadth of Support

The amount of local support the applicant has at its disposal must be congruent with the scope of sites and functionality. Do not, for example, propose a deployment with a broad geographic span if all your support staff is in a central city.

“Support” encompasses the experience and expertise of the primary applicant for the grant, local training and technical capacity, including potential developers, and local government commitment to ICT in general and FOSS in particular.

Note on Languages

We have put significant effort into supporting internationalization and localization in SchoolTool, and we expect this program to improve that support further. We do not know of any particular restrictions on what languages SchoolTool can support. We have noted that SchoolTool is limited to the western (Gregorian) calendar.

While we expect that it is likely the users of SchoolTool as part of this grant may not be English speakers, our international development team primarily communicates in English, so the primary contacts between our developers and the recipient organizations will be in English. The recipient organization is responsible for communicating directly with users. We do have individual members of the team who speak Spanish, Lithuanian, or Italian fluently.

Timeline

• March 5: A preliminary application is not required, but recommended. This includes the first part of “Who” and “What.” One submitted later in March is better than none at all.
• April 1, 2010: Final proposal deadline.
• Mid-April, 2010: Winners announced.
• May 1, 2010: Development work begins.

Questions

Feel free to email SchoolTool project manager Tom Hoffman at hoffman@schooltool.org. For those so inclined, you may also ask questions on IRC at #schooltool on freenode.

Application

Please email applications (either in the email body or as an attachment in a text file or other open format) to hoffman@schooltool.org, subject line: SCHOOLTOOL GRANT APPLICATION

The application is broken up into six parts: who, what, when, where, how, and why. For the most part, short narrative answers are sufficient. Please feel free to include URL’s to relevant web pages (in English) in lieu of copy/pasting text into the application.

Who

Please describe (or provide links for) the organizations applying for the grant, and the people within the organization responsible for overseeing this project, should you get the grant, Include email, phone and mail contact information for the above. (required for preliminary proposal)

Please outline any relevant experience the applicant(s) has, particularly in specifying, deploying and supporting software for schools.

What

What do you want the users to do with SchoolTool? What are the users’ requirements? Are there specific reporting requirements, particularly for regional and national authorities? (required for preliminary proposal)

Requirements gathering is one of if not the most difficult part of software development, so we don’t expect the we’ll get this right on the first try. Ideally, the applicant will submit this section (along with the first part of “Who”) as a preliminary application by March 5, which will allow the development team to ask follow-up questions to flesh out our understanding of the local needs.

In a preliminary application, one to two pages should be sufficient. However, generally the more detail the better, particularly if the applicant can take into account the current capabilities of SchoolTool and cite particular omissions. If there are specific data dictionaries or other documentation of local requirements, please provide copies as attachments or URL’s. Pay particular attention to import and export formats and reports.

When

Please provide key dates in the 2010 and 2011 school year and an estimate of possible time frame for a pilot deployment. We would like to get at least one cycle of a pilot deployment, collecting user feedback and deploying further changes before the end of 2010.

Where

Please describe the initial pilot sites as well as any planned full deployments. Describe in detail the technical capacity of the sites. Keep in mind the issues described in “Scope of Sites” above.

How

Explain how personnel at the pilot and deployment sites will be trained and supported. Remember that some funds may be earmarked for collecting feedback from users through focus groups or other meetings.

Where will the SchoolTool servers be hosted? Who will be responsible for purchasing and maintaining them?

Why

Why are you interested in using SchoolTool? Is there a larger government policy promoting the use of free and open source software?