" By taking a not-for-profit approach and using freely available open-source tools, Saanich officials expect to develop openStudent for under $5 million, with yearly maintenance pegged at less than $1 million."
They estimate that using their old software would cost $100mm over ten years. They're reducing that to roughly $15-20mm.
Government software is lovingly expensive. The state I live in spent over $30mm to rebuild a purchasing application. And it doesn't even work!
I am the Director of IT for the Saanich school district which has incubated this project. There is a lot to say about how we got here but this is a somewhat different project than most other open source student information systems (and all commercial products that we are aware of).
Firstly it is build from the ground up to work as an enterprise system. Meaning rather than just function for a district and its schools our system is architected to function at the provincial or state / district / school level.
The system is designed to accommodate cross-enrolment between schools within a district and between districts. As well it can accommodate continuous entry (year round schools) and is built for conventional as well as distance learning schools.
It is also has a sophisticated security model which considers users at the enterprise level, district level, school level or any combination thereof. In other words you can be a vice-principal at one school (with that view), a teacher in the same school (with that view) and a parent with children in another school district.
The system is also built to work in a distributed hosting model where the primary can be at one site and secondarys at other sites. With the next version of PostgresQL it will be possible to have multiple primaries.
There is so much that is different about this system from the standard SIS. With its capacity to function at the enterprise system it could accommodate an entire state or province.
Right now the system has been licensed under the Education Community Source license (modified Apache 2) to ensure that we have better control of the code but we are definitely looking for input and help into the system and it will be available to other jurisdictions when it is complete.
Have a look at the documenation on our website and I will try and answer any questions or comments relating the the system.
Thanks for all the supportive comments.
Gregg Ferrie
PS if you wonder why this has gotten this much support in a relatively small school district we had already converted most of our servers and workstations to Linux-based diskless clients (approximately 2500 in 18 schools). All of teachers and students are used to using open source software including LibreOffice, Scribus, The Gimp and many more.
They estimate that using their old software would cost $100mm over ten years. They're reducing that to roughly $15-20mm.
Government software is lovingly expensive. The state I live in spent over $30mm to rebuild a purchasing application. And it doesn't even work!
Go figure.