schooltoolers team mailing list archive

[Tom Hoffman <tom.hoffman@xxxxxxxxx>]

I've prepared a screencast of the work the SchoolTool development team
has been doing in the past two weeks which I'm anxious to share, but
it requires a little explanation, particularly in the context of the
ongoing development grant RFP we have out:
http://book.schooltool.org/htmlhelp/grant-rfp.html

It is an open secret that we've been talking with the Open Institute
in Cambodia since last fall about the possibility of using SchoolTool
in Cambodian schools.  These conversations led directly to the grant
program we announced in January -- as the plans for the new year came
together, Cambodia looked like a great Plan A, but there were no Plans
B, C, or D.  Given the inherent uncertainties of working with schools,
government ministries, sites separated from our team by vast distances
-- and particularly all at the same time -- I cooked up the grant RFP
to give us some backup, and so far that plan appears to be working
perfectly.

Last month, however, it became apparent to me that we'd better get
moving on this Cambodia work immediately rather than waiting for the
grant application process to play out or risk losing the opportunity
entirely, so that's what we did, and you can see the initial results
here:

http://vimeo.com/10121248

Now... what are the implications for the grant competition?  Well, it
was always fairly likely that if they made a proposal on the terms
we've discussed, Cambodia would be likely to win a share of the grant
competition, since there's a clear opportunity for a national-scale
deployment there.  Of course, I wouldn't be displeased if two even
better opportunities cropped up and made the decision tough, but
that's fairly unlikely.

What's actually happened is that we've ended up investing development
time in Cambodia ahead of the grant program, so this should
correspondingly reduce the amount of the 50,000 euros in the grant
pool needed to get Cambodia up and running (assuming they apply and
are accepted), leaving more money for everyone else, and making it
more likely that we'll be able to support two other small pilot sites
(or another largish one).

Sorry for the longwinded explanation, but I want to both show off what
we've been up to and hopefully reassure people applying for the grant
that they will be treated fairly.

Also, I hope the screencast will give folks a sense of what we can do
with a customized version of SchoolTool aimed at a particular country
and focused set of use cases and improve (even further) the quality of
subsequent grant proposals.  We've certainly learned a lot in the
process.

 Enjoy!

--Tom