SITUATION IN STOCKHOLM:: City's IT Department Strikes Back...Lesson Learned = Citizen development can be more effective than costly and often botched government IT projec

A cautionary story that needs to get told on this Open Source app. Details are included in the entire report by Matt Burgess writing on WIRED.

Here is the Take-away from the Surprise Success.

" Landgren now hopes Öppna Skolplattformen will be able to strike a deal with the City of Stockholm that will result in the city paying for a license to the app. The aim is for it to be made free for all parents. “It's going to look a lot like [the city] buying Microsoft Office,” Landgren says. “A typical license deal.” If the deal can be struck—the details and numbers are still being negotiated—Öppna Skolplattformen volunteers will be paid for their contributions, he says. The founders say the effort has never been about making money and that they have always intended to give any funds generated through downloads to the parents who created it.

These parents built a school app. Then the city called the cops

Official app was a disaster, so knowledgeable parents built an open source alternative.

Matt Burgess, wired.com -

Ars Technica | 11/6/2021, 3:45 AM

"Christian Landgren’s patience was running out. Every day the separated father of three was wasting precious time trying to get the City of Stockholm’s official school system, Skolplattform, to work properly. Landgren would dig through endless convoluted menus to find out what his children were doing at school. If working out what his children needed in their gym kit was a hassle, then working out how to report them as sick was a nightmare. Two years after its launch in August 2018, the Skolplattform had become a constant thorn in the side of thousands of parents across Sweden’s capital city. “All the users and the parents were angry,” Landgren says.

The Skolplattform wasn’t meant to be this way. Commissioned in 2013, the system was intended to make the lives of up to 500,000 children, teachers, and parents in Stockholm easier—acting as the technical backbone for all things education, from registering attendance to keeping a record of grades. The platform is a complex system that’s made up of three different parts, containing 18 individual modules that are maintained by five external companies. The sprawling system is used by 600 preschools and 177 schools, with separate logins for every teacher, student, and parent.

The only problem? It doesn’t work . . . "