schooltoolers team mailing list archive

[David Ally <david_ally@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Tom, Alan,

This is an important update on the progress so far on Nigerian deployment, some of these discussions Tom is already aware of.

Throughout last week, I was in NIEPA Ondo state where the EPSSim training was taking place, EPSSim is Education Policy strategy Simulation. There is Education sector strategic  planning (ESSP) currently taking place in 16 states of the country, and you know data is needed for this planning purposes. As a follow up to the training, we had a meeting at the instance of UNICEF and UNESCO in Abuja this morning on how to make progress.

There is going to be a formal meeting of management stakeholders on what SchoolTool and related tools for deployment going to offer and how it supports and provid solutions to some critical data problems in Nigeria, and I'm to plan that meeting with NIEPA and get all items ready before invitations will be sent out to them; the management stakeholders are Federal Ministry of Education (FME), National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), EDSI (Consultant on ESSP), UNESCO, UNICEF, WORLD BANK, DFID and others.

Before this meeting, we have to get the various tools deployed and integrated for the sake of demonstration to these group, so I'll begin to make request for some initial development work,specifically, that will involve customization of SchoolTool to reflect Nigerian situation and data import between SchoolTool and EMIS.

For initial memory jogging, RapidSMS is going to be the bridge between SchoolTool and EMIS, Alan please just read up some stuff on RapidSMS on http://www.rapidsms.org, but basically, it is framework comprising applications, backend (GSM, Http, Database etc), we are only interested in the GSM (sms), RapidSMS will be used to send data import from SchoolTool to EMIS, I'll send the data structure for EMIS soon, but initial data exchange between SchoolTool and EMIS, may not be ideal through sms, because this data would be so huge, but subsequent weekly data update sms should be able to cope. I earlier on sent you a School Census Form, which has been in use for this data gathering purposes, so please see what data import from SchoolTool map to those data fields.

I'll in the meantime make arrangement with a volunteer school here to use their school data for initial deployment on my laptop and see if I can get the dbs to exchange data manually using RapidSMS. And later we think of the automation process. 

We need alot of momentum now that green light has been given for this project, because FME was also proesent at the meeting and their acceptance means standardizing on our solution for the entire nation.

I look forward to you critical and positive inputs.

David

Any input into my thinking of how things ought to be done would be appreciated from all of you.   








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From: Tom Hoffman <tom.hoffman@xxxxxxxxx>
To: SchoolTool Users <schooltoolers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tue, June 22, 2010 6:00:08 PM
Subject: Re: [Schooltoolers] SchoolTool Receives Award from Commonwealth of Virginia

On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 12:35 PM, Tom Hoffman <tom.hoffman@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:


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>Thanks to David Welsh, Jeff Elkner, and all the folks in Arlington and Richmond who've worked with us on this, and to Paul Carduner, Filip Sufitchi, Alan Elkner, Douglas Cerna and all the other developers who have contributed over the years!
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And as always, thanks to Mark Shuttleworth, of course.  ;-) 

--Tom