The OSSMS project is a large-scale Open Source (OS) development project, collaboratively undertaken by the CSIR, Kgatelopele Technologies and Wits University. The focus of OSSMS is to develop an Open Source-enabled school administration and management system and to facilitate its long-term sustainability through a strong Open Source community.
This project has its roots in the Shuttleworth Foundation's (TSF) Schooltool project, and TSF continues to provide support, expertise and inspiration towards this project. The UK Government's Department for International Development (DFID) Imfundo is another key partner, that has been instrumental in getting this project off the ground in such a short time.
The project also has numerous contributors, stakeholders and general enthusiasts including (but not limited to) NetDay, Linuxlab, SchoolNet SA, SchoolNet Namibia, UNISA, Direqlearn and the SA Department of Education.
This document presents a summary of the development related to the OSSMS project to date. The document is structured as follows:
If you would like to help out or contact us, but do not wish to read the entire document, please skip directly to section 10 at the end of the document.
The OSSMS vision was borne from the discontinuation of the SchoolTool project -- an Open Source school management and administration system whose development was funded and conducted by The Shuttleworth Foundation. Unfortunately, the project came to a standstill in the latter half of 2002. Reasons for this were mostly internal: TSF felt that taking on a development role detracted them from their primary focus of evaluating and funding proposals. Also, the chosen technical platform caused some difficulties in the continuation of the development.
When the cessation of the SchoolTool project was publicly announced, the SchoolTool advocacy group -- consisting of a number of SchoolTool and OS advocates -- met to discuss ways in which this project could be revived. The OSSMS project is the result of those efforts.
The vision for the new school management system is that it will serve the educators at schools, first and foremost. Its Open Source nature will allow third party contributions, especially from learners and staff within schools that use the software. Its initial use is intended for South Africa but there is definite potential for its widespread use in other countries, with particular focus on African countries.
The predominant focus of the system is to provide administrative support to schools, including and definitely not limited to the management of:
Additional focusses have been considered for the future, including:
With numerous Open source and proprietary school management systems available, it is natural for people to ask what the rationale is for developing another one from scratch. To our knowledge there is no South African Open Source school management system. Also, according to a study initiated by TSF in 2002, existing Open Source systems are either at very early stages of development, or would require substantial modification to adapt them to our needs. The study concluded that an Open Source school management system for South Africa remains a need and a priority.
The key that will differentiate OSSMS from other initiatives is a combination of:
The OSSMS consortium consists of:
The project consists of two main facets. The first involves the development of a prototype system, based on Kgatelopele's existing system eSchoolman. The second involves the design and development of a new system from first principles that will eventually become the new OSSMS. The reasons for taking this approach are as follows:
However, eSchoolman is not architecturally well-structured to support an Open Source development model. It has a flat structure and very little modularity which makes managing additional functionality difficult, particularly in a setting where there are multiple contributors. Thus it was decided that no additional major development will be done on eSchoolman once the prototype phase is complete.
The user requirements analysis and architecture design tasks have recently been completed, and system development is currently underway. All documentation and source will be made available to the Open Source community for comments and peer review. The architecture document is currently available.
The project funding will support the development of a limited amount of functionality. The intention is to develop as much of the basic core functionality (as identified through the requirements analysis) as possible, and identify additional modules that will in time be contributed by third parties (or through additional funding).
The project is being developed according to the following phases:
Phase 1: Project Initiation and Prototype
Date of completion: Mid February 2003
This phase involves the completion of the prototype, based on eSchoolman. Feedback gathered from the pilot schools will feed into the user requirements analysis phase.
Deliverables:
Phase 2: User Requirements
Expected date of completion: Mid March 2003
User requirements will fall into 2 broad categories: operational (school-facing) and EMIS (government-facing). However the former category will form the focus of the project.
Operational requirements will be gathered from the eSchoolman outcomes, existing school management systems (including SchoolTool and other OSS and proprietary solutions), and interviews conducted with a number of schools in the country. A selection of pilot schools for the new version of OSSMS will also be identified in this phase.
In terms of EMIS functionality, we are considering integrating with an existing DoE system. More specifically, Deved's Edusol product, deployed at various DoE offices, has a well defined interface that allows it to integrate with other school-facing management systems. (Deved has expressed interest in the OSSMS project and is happy for us to interface with their system on the DoE (EMIS) side.)
Deliverables:
Phase 3: Architecture Design
Expected date of completion: Mid April 2003
In this phase, the multi-tiered architecture will be designed. An important contribution of this phase is a design that supports an OS development model through good use of abstraction and modularity. It is envisaged that the system will be structured around a core, through which the functional modules of the system will integrate. This will control access to system resources, which means that system security will be greatly improved and that critical global changes will be confined to one area of the code.
This phase also includes the design of the GUI architecture which defines the information flow and layout of the system. All documents will be released for peer review at the end of this phase.
Deliverables:
Phase 4: Core Management Module Development
Expected date of completion: Mid June 2003
This phase involves the specification, detailed design and development of the core management module of the system. Due to the importance and complexity of this module, a reasonable amount of time has been allocated to this task. All source and documentation resulting from this phase will be released once completed. However, the core management module itself will not constitute a runnable system.
Deliverables:
Phase 5: Development of Core Functionality
Expected date of completion: End July 2003
This phase involves the specification, detailed design and development of the core functionality of the system as identified by the user requirements. Each core module will be thoroughly tested and integrated into the system as soon as it is sufficiently stable and error-free.
The integration of the core functional modules with the core management module will result in a functional, runnable school management system -- although obviously with limited functionality.
Deliverables:
Funding was originally requested from both the DFID and TSF. At this point, the DFID funding has been approved, while our proposal to TSF was unfortunately rejected. This has required us to reevaluate our original project plan and review TSF's reasons for rejecting the proposal as a way to improve the project and correct potential mistakes.
TSF's main reasons for turning down the proposal were:
For various reasons, it was decided not to modify and resubmit the original proposal to TSF. After careful analysis and planning, the project team decided that with some adjustments to the project plan and methods of work, the project could be carried out on the DFID funding. Some of the decision made were to:
In addition, the project team is addressing the community and sustainability challenges and hopes to include TSF in this regard in a future proposal (more details regarding this will be published soon).
OSSMS will be licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The consortium and key stakeholders have unamimously tended towards this license from the start of the project. It was felt that other licensing options may lead to the commercialisation of the product which seems undesirable in the educational arena.
In the spirit of Open Source, the OSSMS consortium invites all interested parties to participate and have their say. We believe that we can only benefit more by increased participation. As you already know, the industry giants have an enormous amount of power and thus a large amount of influence over decisions made in government. So it is only by presenting a strong, enthusiastic, united front that we can show the power of Open Source, its community and its technology.
The OSSMS consortium will endeavour to post updates regarding the project regularly on this forum. If you (or your organisation) would like to help in any way please let us know. Input would be graciously accepted in the following areas:
The central point of contact for the OSSMS project is:
Ms Adi Attar