In the Swedish capital Stockholm, IT savvy parents banded together to make a better version of the official app for school administration. The project of volunteers, completely developed in open source, was first rejected, but is now expanding further.
It’s no secret that developing an IT project that needs to work between a number of different IT systems, user groups and has many implementation sites is a complex business. The city of Stockholm decided in August 2013 that its existing online school platform could not be renewed and would have to be replaced to serve its function in line with current expectations of IT systems.
For this, around €70 million (SEK 695 million) were allocated, to develop the back-end and front-end for the new “skolplattformen”. Eventually five external companies were tasked with developing a one-stop-shop that would be used by the 140 000 children, 23 500 teachers and 200 000 parents of Stockholm alike, across 600 pre-schools, 177 schools. The platform would cover:
- pedagogical implementation,
- planning and grades,
- student documentation,
- absence and attendance registration,
- class schedule,
- extra-curricular activities and
- child and pupil registers.
Yet, when the app for parents was released in 2018 many expressed their dissatisfaction. To alleviate the problem, parents around the software developer Christian Landgren developed an unofficial alternative app for parents that would make it easier to check on their children’s lunch menu, class schedule and inform the school about absences.
It was humble beginnings, as the parent simply reverse-engineered how the official app would access the skolplatform back-end, while waiting for the school administration to give him access to the API. Lundgren, founder of an IT consulting firm, was eventually joined by two further parents and developers: Johan Öbrink and Erik Hellman. The city of Stockholm was concerned that the way the new app, now called “Öppna Skolplatformen” accesses the school data would expose personal data of teachers and students to the public and thus did not give the team access to the official platform.
The developers are calling themselves “privacy fanatics”, asserting “All information in the app comes from the School Platform. The information never leaves your phone. No information about you or your children is collected. What is stored is something that is stored in your phone so that it is faster to use the app. No information is sent from your mobile device or stored, analyzed or processed elsewhere.”
The app is available today on GitHub under the open source license Apache 2.0, with many suggesting new features and reporting issues they are having on the code sharing platform. The number of collaborators has grown to 50 since the release in February 2021 and it continues to be actively developed. Though the app was available free of charge initially, with the aim to “continue to develop it further and also have the opportunity to compensate those who help” the decision was made to start charging SEK 11 for downloading the app from the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.
In August the city of Stockholm officially changed its position and allow third-party access to the school platform data, after a license that sets out the framework for using the data has been agreed with the external provider of the official platform. The decision shows that the project had success and this was seen by others too: The city of Gothenburg, Sweden’s second largest city, has opened its own school system to the Öppna Skolplatform app. In Gothenburg this was an easy process, as the city already requires the usage of open interfaces to the back-end.