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Stockholm’s official schools app was a disaster. So annoyed parents built their own open source version — a good case for open APIs (www.wired.com)

submitted 3 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The Skolplattform, which has cost more than 1 billion Swedish Krona, SEK, ($117 million), has failed to match its initial ambition. Parents and teachers have complained about the complexity of the system—its launch was delayed, there have been reports of project mismanagement, and it has been labelled an IT disaster. The Android version of the app has an average 1.2 star rating.

A pity that the parents' open source alternative was originally so negatively received by the officials, but good that in the end there was acceptance. It goes to show though that with open data APIs, some tremendous innovation and improvements can be made available. There is nothing wrong with having two or three alternative apps to use. Application Program Interfaces (API) just need to differentiate between public data to be used vs data that an authenticated individual is allowed to access.

See https://www.wired.com/story/sweden-stockholm-school-app-open-source/

#technology #schools #sweden #opensource

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago (1 children)

In developed countries where you can't stretch your leg without kicking a programmer's butt and people who have more than 40 hours of free time a week? Sure!

Other parts of the world, good luck finding a programmer who knows development and deployment AND actually have time and energy to do it AND willing to do it for free!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago

Actually quite a few people do it for free. In Sweden's case it was parents who had an interest to do it. If there is a documented API, it makes the job a lot easier as it is just a client-end UI that is needed.