A week ago I pointed to SchoolTool, an open-source project trying to create school administration software package. Tom Hoffman noticed my link and wrote an interesting history of the project. Then, the person paying for the development, Mark Shuttleworth, responded to Tom's post. Quite the chain of events, huh?
Anyway, both Tom's post and Mark's response are well worth a read. Both contain some interesting notes about SchoolTool itself, but they mostly focus on the management of open source projects. This makes them must-reads for anyone thinking of starting an open-source project.
In short, open source projects need a strong management component. Even well-funded projects with full-time developers need someone at the helm. From Mark:
So the risk is that a well-funded open source team that is NOT lead by someone with a personal interest in shipping the project will get distracted by other shiny tech toys and fail to actually ship something focused and constructive. How are we dealing with that in the current round of work on SchoolTool? First, I'm personally watching and asking the core team to focus on actual functionality. They assure me that their engine work is "done", and that they are currently working on a usable tool that can be tested by schools.
Time will tell. And second, we will shortly have a second, collaborating team, that will I hope also bring much of the engineering work into a more public forum. Time will tell. These are expensive ways to learn, but I feel that the experiment is very much worth doing. There are lots of tools I would like to see developed in the open source world that developers have not yet done for themselves, and which I would be prepared to fund. Perhaps other philanthropists are in a similar position. We need to learn how to do this effectively, and the only way to learn is to try.
Regardless, SchoolTool looks to be a project to keep an eye on. Between this and EduPlone, there looks to be some good activity in the open-source/education world.
[Update, 7/30/05: fixed EduPlone URL.]
Posted by Karl
November 19, 2003 02:00 PM