Looking for a Schoolbase-using (or other) school for cooperation

[jwinters]

For some years, I've been working on an open-source scheduling program, intended specifically for schools. It pulls together all the different types of thing happening within a school, and displays them in a Google Calendar-like way, but with the structure preserved. Thus you can choose to see all upcoming events (timetable, cover, invigilation, activities, trips, external events, public events, school calendar duties, etc.) for any selected individual, location, category etc. It detects and flags certain types of clashes, and the development plan would have it doing more of this in the future.

 

It's currently in use in one school (over 1000 pupils, several hundred staff) and is well thought of. As the intention has always been to make it more generally available under the GPL, I'm looking to open it up further.

 

When the program was first started, the school used its own in-house MIS. The timetable was imported from that. Then they migrated to SchoolBase, and I wrote a utility which ran nightly, pulling over all the necessary scheduling information. The trouble was, it was single 5000 line program - not nice, although it worked fine.

 

When the school migrated to iSAMS, I took the opportunity to re-work the importer. It's now thoroughly modular, and split into three areas:

 

• General code
  
• iSAMS-specific code
  
• School-specific code
  

Of course, how well I've done this won't be tested until it's used in another school, ideally one using a different MIS.

 

Would anyone be interested in cooperating on that all-important second installation? I'm not looking for any money to change hands (in either direction) but it would call for some cooperation time. You'd get a rather nice unified scheduling program for your school; I'd get the means to polish it further.

 

The scheduling program itself is a Rails-based web application, which works with any modern web browser. It also provides feeds so that staff and pupils can get their full unified schedule (not just their timetable) on their mobile devices.

 

Cheers,

John