School Online Bootstrap Guide/Kit

README.md

Kudos to @paulscott56 for the cool name. It all started on twitter.

School Online Bootstrap Guide/Kit

School websites suck, actually, schools suck at being online. But in reality, schools don't need much to be online. 99/100 times the minimum viable school site might just be single static page with contact information, links to FB and/or Twitter. Oh, and a "add my to the mailing list" feature, cause that would be better...

The sad thing is that currently we have three camps, maybe more:

1. Schools getting exploited by unsavoury IT companies and paying big bucks for mediocre FOSS deployments with Corel Draw graphics.
2. Schools teachers acting defensively against anyone who is better than them at operating Dreamweaver
3. Schools that are invisible to parents who are online.

We also have to work on the assumption that schools cant/wont pay for anything we do... This is why it should be a guide, and maybe a separate service can be spun off from this work.

Get involved!

Comment below as a last resort. Send an email to [email protected] to join the conversation, or browse the archives.

MVP

1. Guide that explains to schools (that care) what the minimum viable online school presence is, and it is less than we think
2. Guide that explains how email marketing systems can be used to communicate with parents, which ones are good and offering good deals for schools
3. Guide on how to make a Facebook page to share other stuff, like sporting events and photos
4. Guide to service providers that help schools out with free hosting and/or email

Survey the masses

We think we know, but the reality is we don't... I propose we make three surveys, targeting Teachers, Scholars & Parents. Asking them what they expect from a schools online presence.

We can drive this through Google Docs, and get in touch with schools in our areas and through family broaden the reach of the survey. I think we'll be pleasently surprised.

Guide format

I recommend we build using a static site generator, I'm biased towards middleman, but any static site generator will do.

The reason for a static site is that we can easily accept pull requests on Github from other capable citizens that want to help. Another side benefit is that if we offer guides on how to use MadMimi or another service, we can get them to maintain those guides via pull requests.

The above holds for folks who want to submit more detailed guides on how to run a WordPress site, or something similar. Likewise, service providers can fork and add themselves to the pages.

Heck, even schools following the guides can add themselves, that way the kids can get into making FOSS contributions.

What else ?

No idea, but I think choosing a good static generator and crafting the survey would be the next best steps.

I think before we start doing any tooling for the schools, we should first focus on how to build our guides, and what kind of recommendations we should make to schools. For this I propose the following:

1. We use a simple static site generator, write the initial ideas out as simple markdown files.
2. We flesh out the ideas for the 3 surveys, and get people filling them in so we know what the different audiences actually want.

I'm going to insist that the guides be static pages. There is absolutely zero benefit to using a database to silo the information in. In the spirit of FOSS, even our content should be available to be forked and updated.

So for the static site generator, I'm looking at JavaScript-based ones. For curious students (which I hope is an accidental side-effect of what we do), getting started with JavaScript is so much easier than Ruby, PHP, Java, .NET or any other language for that matter. They already have several JS implementations on their desktops...

And with a static site for guidelines we're avoiding any implicit biases. Personally, I would not deploy PHP for anything, ever again. But I'm not going to force Ruby or GO onto users either.

Back to what schools want/need. Based on the feedback from the surveys we'll have a better idea of what to propose on. Then we can build reference implementations to help folks out. But without actually understanding our market, we're gonna be dead in the water.

This has to follow a very "lean startup" approach.

Oh, let me add, wherever possible I think we should lean on commercial products that are willing to support schools for (nearly) free. I don't think we should be building the next Mailchimp/Everlytic/MadMimi for them to send emails with.