School platform APIs not disclosed – no documentation

School Platform is a digital platform created for pre-school, primary and secondary schools in the city of Stockholm. It was built from the ground up as a new modular system, but since its launch it has been painted with both bugs and Serious deficiencies in safety. The dissatisfaction of both school staff and parents led a group of parents to develop their own app, Open the School Platform.

The Open School platform uses the same API as the school platform, which can be described as a bridge to connect data between two points. Since its release, it has been opposed by the Department of Education, which refused a request to access the documents due to confidentiality. Opening the school platform was also asked to delete its source code and Threatened with a police report. The refusal related to the documents was appealed to the Court of Appeal, which now decided the refusal, but not because of confidentiality. considered instead very hardworking.

The investigation of the case shows that the Department of Education does not have any open APIs regarding the school platform and thus the APIs are not collected in an orderly manner. In this context, open APIs refer to APIs that have been published for public use. The Department of Education stated that the work of producing and compiling the APIs available in the Department should be done by an external resource and that the time required to work was 30-40 hours. Stockholm Court of Appeal

According to the judgment, the required information is missing and it will be very difficult to obtain it. Since a lot of work is required, it will not be considered a public document, and the application is rejected. This does not necessarily mean that there is no form of documentation at all, but the recognition that there is no structured or comprehensive documentation probably means the same thing in practice. Some were also rejected on the grounds that the requested documents are with another authority.

Regardless of whether the information is classified or not, it is remarkable that the system, costing more than one billion Swedish kronor, allegedly lacks comprehensive documentation. The school platform is intended to operate modularly, and has been developed by many different consulting firms. Strong documentation should be of paramount importance to continue building on a system that is said to work this way.

Even without these functions, you must be part of a business for the cost posed by the school platform, according to which new technology I did. A document from 2013 regarding the City of Stockholm’s procurement of the school platform states that suppliers will provide both written documentation and a software developer kit (SDK) prior to commissioning the system.

According to the head of the Department of Education, Lena Holmdahl, the information is available, but it has not been collected in the way required. It is not clear how exactly they are assembled. Opening School Platform announces that as a next step, they will request the school platform source code instead.

Read more about Open the School Platform: