schooltoolers team mailing list archive

[Tom Hoffman <tom.hoffman@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi All,

Below is an edited version (leaving out personnel reports and some
other sensitive details) of my report to Mark Shuttleworth on
SchoolTool 2009 and plans for 2010.  Mark has approved the plan,
including a generous increase in his contribution to the project.

I hope to have hard details on the grant RFP mentioned below out by next week.

Many thanks to Mark for his continued vision and commitment.

--Tom


SchoolTool 2010 Plan and Budget
===============================

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.