About - Kosudo/nextSIS GitHub Wiki

What?

Welcome to the nextSIS wiki, and let me start with an apology - there is no code here yet. So is this yet another of those Monday-morning projects that gets abandoned by Tuesday with its ghost left on GitHub? No, because this project was begun on a Tuesday, and baring my mysterious death at the hands of the shadowy Student Information System movement, this is a project that's going to get done - and it's going to get done very publicly, even before any code is ready.

Why?

Because have you used a good open-source SIS recently? And seriously, if you have - tell me. Nine months before starting this project I was recruited part-time by a school to implement an allegedly popular SIS which looked a bit old and quirky and that's before I discovered it had 84,000 lines of code which were the closest thing I've ever seen as a developer to a Big Ball of Mud.

My lawyer - the cockroach that lives in the corner of my office - says it cannot be named, so I will henceforth call it namelessSIS. namelessSIS Inc., which does the programming and hosts a commercial version which probably works better as well as having more features, has a forum on its website but doesn't respond to bug reports, questions, or songs about elves.

OK, I made up the bit about elves, but open source should be collaborative and a few months into using namelessSIS it became clear it had serious bugs, and it also became clear that if I tried to fix and enhance the big ball of mud you were going to end up reading about me in the news. But we'd searched the market before selecting namelessSIS, and there wasn't an alternative that would work for us. There comes a point when you see that developing a new system from the beginning is ultimately going to be a much less stressful and a much better use of your time, and if the comments sent to me from other namelessSIS users are anything to go by, people want a viable alternative.

How?

nextSIS and its developers (i.e. me) must be user-friendly, it must be easy to implement and easy to change. And this means talking to people, it means documenting what's been done and generally being as open and transparent as possible about the process. This probably means PHP and MySQL.

I'd love you to join me - and it doesn't matter if you're a coder, a potential user, a concerned citizen, or an elf. I believe a community of diverse interests will only make this project better. But if you're a coder, I'll probably love you forever (which for me might be about 30 more years as long as I stop using namelessSIS). Because...

Who?

I'm Mike Moriarty, and I'm the coding equivalent of ground pounder. Leading an open-source project feels like it's above my pay grade, but sometimes you're the wrong person in the right place at the wrong time - or something like that. My school needs this, but do you know what I've learned from my inbox? Schools with little spare money in Africa who are trying hard to be better with little in the way of technical support need this too, so their children's education can be that little bit better and money can be spent on textbooks rather than expensive software from 'developed-world' companies that doesn't work very well. This started off as a project, but to me it's now become a bit of a mission.

Where?

I live in South Korea, thanks for asking, where I work for an international school in Busan. You can contact me directly here.