Tom Hoffman
2007-12-12 17:52:47 UTC
I've looked over the report I wrote for Mark on SchoolTool's progress
this year, and I don't see any reason not to send it out to the list
in unedited form:
2007 SchoolTool Report
======================
Tom Hoffman
Overview
--------
The basic changes in process we made this year were effective.
Development has moved forward much more steadily and consistently than
in the past and more closely aligned with the immediate needs of
schools. Local funding of active CanDo development has boosted our
base of developers and testers, addressing our most pressing
constraints. Our school/developer relationship in Brussels did not
work out, at more of a cost of time than money.
Code
----
We've now got running code being tested or used in production for our
major components:
- Demographics: Ignas wrote a simpler demographics package to meet
the needs of the Vilnius Lyceum and CanDo. It is being used at both
sites. There is still a lot of functionality to be built on this
base--primarily reports--but the foundation is solid.
- Gradebook: Alan Elkner picked up development of the gradebook
module Stephan Richter started last year. It is currently used by
Jeff Elkner. Ian Benson will be using it to gather data from maths
teachers in eight schools in the UK using his Tizard curriculum. The
CanDo competency-based gradebook is also being used in production in
the Arlington Career Academy.
- Attendance: Ignas has implemented a "journal" attendance and
grading application for the Vilnius Lyceum, which allows teachers to
enter a grade for each meeting of the class or mark and absence. The
Computer Science department at the Lyceum is currently testing this.
Going forward, this will become the standard SchoolTool attendance
system.
- Calendaring: The calendaring code has been cleaned up and improved
with input from CanDo and testing at Vilnius Lyceum. It needs more
testing and tightening in real use.
Other ongoing code issues:
- Interoperability. We funded initial LDAP integration via the Tizard
project; Ignas is doing further work on it for use at Vilnius Lyceum.
We are planning on supporting CAS for single-sign-on with popular PHP
apps used in schools like Moodle. We've got a simple CAS
implementation already using existing open source code.
- Releases. As you know, the Zope 3 world was in turmoil this year,
especially regarding packaging, and particularly for us the
(non-)release of Zope 3.4. Once it is released we will stick with
Zope 3.4 as long as possible, because a lot of the burden of packaging
Zope 3 and related components for Ubuntu and Debian has fallen upon
us.
We have worked under Brian Sutherland's direction on a set of Ubuntu
packages for the past six months. We had a set of packages ready for
Gutsy but they could not be included in the distribution due to the
non-release of Zope 3.4. We subsequently created a new snapshot and
developed some scripts to generate packages using the Launchpad PPA,
which makes the packaging process much easier going forward.
Unfortunately, we also discovered an arcane bug in the PPA, which is
now being addressed, but in the meantime, we haven't done a full
public release. Since our installation story is now just "apt-get
install schooltool", there is no sense in making a release until the
packages work.
Big pieces missing from the code:
- Dealing with the passage of time, terms, history. For example, when
a student transfers between classes during a term, they can't simply
be deleted from the old section, we need to retain the records from
that section and keep it integrated in reports for the term. These
are issues that touch all parts of the application and will be Ignas's
main development priority in 2008.
- Reports. A general release of SchoolTool will at minimum have to
have a large set of standard report templates. In 2008 we'll be
writing a lot of custom reports for partner schools and deriving
standard ones for general distribution.
- More ways to get data in and out from other applications.
Developers
----------
Ignas: Switching Ignas to working full time on SchoolTool and acting
as "lead developer" and maintainer has been immensely helpful in
getting the project back on solid footing. Put simply, SchoolTool now
functions like an organized open source development project, not a
loose aggregation of contractors managed by a teacher. Ignas has been
available and responsive to me and other participants in the project
and demonstrated strong leadership when needed.
Jean-Francois Roche: When we started working with Jean-Francois, we
were at a point where we needed to find both a developer and a local
school. I think we did ok with Jean-Francois, but the school he (and
Nicolas Pettiaux) found didn't pan out. They just weren't
sufficiently engaged in the project, and Jean-Francois ended up with
an unmotivated and uncooperative "customer." This caused repeated
delays, required increasing nagging to get information from the
school, and with plenty of other (higher-paying) work he could do,
Jean-Francois just ended up spending less time on SchoolTool than we
would have liked him to. The work he did do was fine, and his billing
was in line with the work completed.
After our meeting at the beginning of November, Jean-Francois and I
decided to dissolve the partnership with the school, I gave him some
work to do on the SchoolTool calendar for the rest of the year, and we
left open the possibility of part-time work on SchoolTool next year.
Alan Elkner: An experienced Java developer, Alan started working on
learning Zope 3 and SchoolTool, and open source development processes,
about a year ago. During the summer he did substantial paid work on
CanDo to close up bugs and add features before and after the beginning
of school. After CanDo's budget was exhausted, I started paying him
with unused development funds to continue CanDo bugfixes (some of
which are SchoolTool bugs regardless) as necessary and work on the
SchoolTool gradebook.
Once he climbed the Zope 3 learning curve, Alan became a very useful
and productive member of the team. He has the right disposition for
following through with this work. He's older, not interested in
developing new web framework features, just used to writing
functional, unsexy software for users. He takes Ignas's advice and
direction well. His steady reliability is exactly what we need now.
CanDo Interns: We funded $10,000 worth of work on CanDo by student
interns. Jeff Elkner ran a very active program through the spring to
train high school students to do SchoolTool and CanDo development.
About three students are genuinely productive Zope 3 developers
(which, as you know, is hardly easy). Given the scarcity of Zope 3
developers and the effort already spent training them, we are trying
to keep them engaged.
Schools
=======
Vilnius Lyceum
--------------
Ignas has primarily worked with the three teachers in the computer
science department at the school, which is probably sufficient right
now. When I met with them in Vilnius, it was clear that having local
users had given Ignas a much more focused sense of the requirements
and how reality conflicted with his "beautiful abstractions." I
pushed to have Ignas visit the school weekly to get feedback in
person, and that seems to be helpful as well. Given that Ignas will
also be responsible for the remaining chunk of core development and
organizing releases in 2008, keeping a small but active group of
testers at Lyceum is more important than scaling up to the whole
school.
Lyc?e Emile Jacqmain
--------------------
This is the school in Brussels. We have stopped working with them due
to a lack of interest on their part.
Science Leadership Academy
--------------------------
Science Leadership Academy (SLA) in Philadelphia was one of the
schools we hoped to partner with in 2006, when we found that
partnership didn't work without a local developer. It is essentially
the perfect school for us to work with in terms of capacity. It is a
small, innovative school with a 1-to-1 laptop program, a sys admin on
site and good professional development support. Most importantly, the
principal, Chris Lehmann, developed open source administrative
software (in PHP) as a teacher at his former school. As is usually
the case, it was too specific to that school to be portable to his new
school, but he not only knows exactly what he needs, he can often show
you an example.
The good news is that Alan Elkner moved to Philadelphia this fall, so
we now have our local developer. I flew down last month (another
advantage, I can easily fly there and back in a day) and Alan, Chris
and I met. They are both excited about working together. I know
Chris will push hard to get SchoolTool to do what he needs and deploy
it school-wide in the fall. In particular, he is interested in
student and parent access to data on SchoolTool and basic integration,
including single sign on, with Moodle and Drupal.
Tizard Schools
--------------
Ian Benson approached us via The Shuttleworth Foundation, interested
in using SchoolTool to help gather data from research he's conducting
using his maths curriculum. In the spring we funded his team's work
to add LDAP integration to SchoolTool, allowing him to sync data back
to his LDAP server from the schools. We are currently funding their
packaging of SchoolTool for distribution and deployment to 8 test
schools in the UK. I don't like operating at an additional level of
remove from the actual schools, but since they have some development
capacity, and I had funds available, we've tried this route.
The deployment is currently behind schedule. Hopefully it will be
completed before the end of the calendar year so payments won't be
rolled over to the next year.
this year, and I don't see any reason not to send it out to the list
in unedited form:
2007 SchoolTool Report
======================
Tom Hoffman
Overview
--------
The basic changes in process we made this year were effective.
Development has moved forward much more steadily and consistently than
in the past and more closely aligned with the immediate needs of
schools. Local funding of active CanDo development has boosted our
base of developers and testers, addressing our most pressing
constraints. Our school/developer relationship in Brussels did not
work out, at more of a cost of time than money.
Code
----
We've now got running code being tested or used in production for our
major components:
- Demographics: Ignas wrote a simpler demographics package to meet
the needs of the Vilnius Lyceum and CanDo. It is being used at both
sites. There is still a lot of functionality to be built on this
base--primarily reports--but the foundation is solid.
- Gradebook: Alan Elkner picked up development of the gradebook
module Stephan Richter started last year. It is currently used by
Jeff Elkner. Ian Benson will be using it to gather data from maths
teachers in eight schools in the UK using his Tizard curriculum. The
CanDo competency-based gradebook is also being used in production in
the Arlington Career Academy.
- Attendance: Ignas has implemented a "journal" attendance and
grading application for the Vilnius Lyceum, which allows teachers to
enter a grade for each meeting of the class or mark and absence. The
Computer Science department at the Lyceum is currently testing this.
Going forward, this will become the standard SchoolTool attendance
system.
- Calendaring: The calendaring code has been cleaned up and improved
with input from CanDo and testing at Vilnius Lyceum. It needs more
testing and tightening in real use.
Other ongoing code issues:
- Interoperability. We funded initial LDAP integration via the Tizard
project; Ignas is doing further work on it for use at Vilnius Lyceum.
We are planning on supporting CAS for single-sign-on with popular PHP
apps used in schools like Moodle. We've got a simple CAS
implementation already using existing open source code.
- Releases. As you know, the Zope 3 world was in turmoil this year,
especially regarding packaging, and particularly for us the
(non-)release of Zope 3.4. Once it is released we will stick with
Zope 3.4 as long as possible, because a lot of the burden of packaging
Zope 3 and related components for Ubuntu and Debian has fallen upon
us.
We have worked under Brian Sutherland's direction on a set of Ubuntu
packages for the past six months. We had a set of packages ready for
Gutsy but they could not be included in the distribution due to the
non-release of Zope 3.4. We subsequently created a new snapshot and
developed some scripts to generate packages using the Launchpad PPA,
which makes the packaging process much easier going forward.
Unfortunately, we also discovered an arcane bug in the PPA, which is
now being addressed, but in the meantime, we haven't done a full
public release. Since our installation story is now just "apt-get
install schooltool", there is no sense in making a release until the
packages work.
Big pieces missing from the code:
- Dealing with the passage of time, terms, history. For example, when
a student transfers between classes during a term, they can't simply
be deleted from the old section, we need to retain the records from
that section and keep it integrated in reports for the term. These
are issues that touch all parts of the application and will be Ignas's
main development priority in 2008.
- Reports. A general release of SchoolTool will at minimum have to
have a large set of standard report templates. In 2008 we'll be
writing a lot of custom reports for partner schools and deriving
standard ones for general distribution.
- More ways to get data in and out from other applications.
Developers
----------
Ignas: Switching Ignas to working full time on SchoolTool and acting
as "lead developer" and maintainer has been immensely helpful in
getting the project back on solid footing. Put simply, SchoolTool now
functions like an organized open source development project, not a
loose aggregation of contractors managed by a teacher. Ignas has been
available and responsive to me and other participants in the project
and demonstrated strong leadership when needed.
Jean-Francois Roche: When we started working with Jean-Francois, we
were at a point where we needed to find both a developer and a local
school. I think we did ok with Jean-Francois, but the school he (and
Nicolas Pettiaux) found didn't pan out. They just weren't
sufficiently engaged in the project, and Jean-Francois ended up with
an unmotivated and uncooperative "customer." This caused repeated
delays, required increasing nagging to get information from the
school, and with plenty of other (higher-paying) work he could do,
Jean-Francois just ended up spending less time on SchoolTool than we
would have liked him to. The work he did do was fine, and his billing
was in line with the work completed.
After our meeting at the beginning of November, Jean-Francois and I
decided to dissolve the partnership with the school, I gave him some
work to do on the SchoolTool calendar for the rest of the year, and we
left open the possibility of part-time work on SchoolTool next year.
Alan Elkner: An experienced Java developer, Alan started working on
learning Zope 3 and SchoolTool, and open source development processes,
about a year ago. During the summer he did substantial paid work on
CanDo to close up bugs and add features before and after the beginning
of school. After CanDo's budget was exhausted, I started paying him
with unused development funds to continue CanDo bugfixes (some of
which are SchoolTool bugs regardless) as necessary and work on the
SchoolTool gradebook.
Once he climbed the Zope 3 learning curve, Alan became a very useful
and productive member of the team. He has the right disposition for
following through with this work. He's older, not interested in
developing new web framework features, just used to writing
functional, unsexy software for users. He takes Ignas's advice and
direction well. His steady reliability is exactly what we need now.
CanDo Interns: We funded $10,000 worth of work on CanDo by student
interns. Jeff Elkner ran a very active program through the spring to
train high school students to do SchoolTool and CanDo development.
About three students are genuinely productive Zope 3 developers
(which, as you know, is hardly easy). Given the scarcity of Zope 3
developers and the effort already spent training them, we are trying
to keep them engaged.
Schools
=======
Vilnius Lyceum
--------------
Ignas has primarily worked with the three teachers in the computer
science department at the school, which is probably sufficient right
now. When I met with them in Vilnius, it was clear that having local
users had given Ignas a much more focused sense of the requirements
and how reality conflicted with his "beautiful abstractions." I
pushed to have Ignas visit the school weekly to get feedback in
person, and that seems to be helpful as well. Given that Ignas will
also be responsible for the remaining chunk of core development and
organizing releases in 2008, keeping a small but active group of
testers at Lyceum is more important than scaling up to the whole
school.
Lyc?e Emile Jacqmain
--------------------
This is the school in Brussels. We have stopped working with them due
to a lack of interest on their part.
Science Leadership Academy
--------------------------
Science Leadership Academy (SLA) in Philadelphia was one of the
schools we hoped to partner with in 2006, when we found that
partnership didn't work without a local developer. It is essentially
the perfect school for us to work with in terms of capacity. It is a
small, innovative school with a 1-to-1 laptop program, a sys admin on
site and good professional development support. Most importantly, the
principal, Chris Lehmann, developed open source administrative
software (in PHP) as a teacher at his former school. As is usually
the case, it was too specific to that school to be portable to his new
school, but he not only knows exactly what he needs, he can often show
you an example.
The good news is that Alan Elkner moved to Philadelphia this fall, so
we now have our local developer. I flew down last month (another
advantage, I can easily fly there and back in a day) and Alan, Chris
and I met. They are both excited about working together. I know
Chris will push hard to get SchoolTool to do what he needs and deploy
it school-wide in the fall. In particular, he is interested in
student and parent access to data on SchoolTool and basic integration,
including single sign on, with Moodle and Drupal.
Tizard Schools
--------------
Ian Benson approached us via The Shuttleworth Foundation, interested
in using SchoolTool to help gather data from research he's conducting
using his maths curriculum. In the spring we funded his team's work
to add LDAP integration to SchoolTool, allowing him to sync data back
to his LDAP server from the schools. We are currently funding their
packaging of SchoolTool for distribution and deployment to 8 test
schools in the UK. I don't like operating at an additional level of
remove from the actual schools, but since they have some development
capacity, and I had funds available, we've tried this route.
The deployment is currently behind schedule. Hopefully it will be
completed before the end of the calendar year so payments won't be
rolled over to the next year.