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Enlarge / Öppna Skolplattformen hoped to succeed the place Skolplattform had failed.Comstock | Getty Pictures
Christian Landgren’s persistence was operating out. On daily basis the separated father of three was squandering precious time making an attempt to get the Metropolis of Stockholm’s official faculty system, Skolplattform, to work correctly. Landgren would dig by limitless convoluted menus to search out out what his youngsters had been doing in school. If figuring out what his youngsters wanted of their gymnasium package was a trouble, then figuring out the way to report them as sick was a nightmare. Two years after its launch in August 2018, the Skolplattform had change into a continuing thorn within the facet of 1000’s of oldsters throughout Sweden’s capital metropolis. “All of the customers and the mother and father had been indignant,” Landgren says.
The Skolplattform wasn’t meant to be this fashion. Commissioned in 2013, the system was meant to make the lives of as much as 500,000 youngsters, lecturers, and oldsters in Stockholm simpler—performing because the technical spine for all issues training, from registering attendance to preserving a report of grades. The platform is a posh system that’s made up of three completely different components, containing 18 particular person modules which are maintained by 5 exterior firms. The sprawling system is utilized by 600 preschools and 177 colleges, with separate logins for each instructor, scholar, and mum or dad. The one drawback? It doesn’t work.
The Skolplattform, which has value greater than 1 billion Swedish Krona, SEK, ($117 million), has didn’t match its preliminary ambition. Dad and mom and lecturers have complained concerning the complexity of the system—its launch was delayed, there have been experiences of challenge mismanagement, and it has been labeled an IT catastrophe. The Android model of the app has a mean 1.2 star score.
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On October 23, 2020, Landgren, a developer and the CEO of Swedish innovation consulting agency Iteam, tweeted a hat design emblazoned with the phrases “Skrota Skolplattformen”—loosely translated as “trash the varsity platform.” He joked he ought to put on the hat when he picks his youngsters up from faculty. Weeks later, carrying that very hat, he determined to take issues into his personal palms. “From my very own frustration, I simply began to create my very own app,” Landgren says.
He wrote to metropolis officers asking to see the Skolplattform’s API paperwork. Whereas ready for a response, he logged into his account and tried to work out whether or not the system could possibly be reverse-engineered. In just some hours, he had created one thing that labored. “I had data on my display screen from the varsity platform,” he says. “After which I began constructing an API on prime of their awful API.”
The work began on the finish of November 2020, simply days after Stockholm’s Board of Schooling was hit with a 4 million SEK GDPR positive for “severe shortcomings” within the Skolplattform. Integritetsskyddsmyndigheten, Sweden’s information regulator, had discovered severe flaws within the platform that had uncovered the information of tons of of 1000’s of oldsters, youngsters, and lecturers. In some instances, folks’s private data could possibly be accessed from Google searches. (The issues have since been mounted and the positive diminished on attraction.)
Within the weeks that adopted, Landgren teamed up with fellow builders and oldsters Johan Öbrink and Erik Hellman, and the trio hatched a plan. They might create an open supply model of the Skolplattform and launch it as an app that could possibly be utilized by pissed off mother and father throughout Stockholm. Constructing on Landgren’s earlier work, the crew opened Chrome’s developer instruments, logged into the Skolplattform, and wrote down all of the URLs and payloads. They took the code, which referred to as the platform’s personal API and constructed packages so it may run on a telephone—basically making a layer on prime of the present, glitchy Skolplattform.
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The end result was the Öppna Skolplattformen, or Open Faculty Platform. The app was launched on February 12, 2021, and all of its code is revealed below an open supply license on GitHub. Anybody can take or use the code, with only a few limitations on what they’ll do with it. If town needed to make use of any of the code, it may. However relatively than welcome it with open arms, metropolis officers reacted with indignation. Even earlier than the app was launched, the Metropolis of Stockholm warned Landgren that it is likely to be unlawful.
Within the eight months that adopted, Stockholms Stad, or the Metropolis of Stockholm, tried to derail and shut down the open supply app. It warned mother and father to cease utilizing the app and alleged that it is likely to be illegally accessing folks’s private data. Officers reported the app to information safety authorities and, Landgren claims, tweaked the official system’s underlying code to cease the spin-off from working in any respect.
Then, in April, town introduced it was getting the police concerned. Officers claimed the app and its cofounders could have dedicated a prison information breach and requested cybercrime investigators to look into how the app labored. The transfer took Landgren, who had been assembly with metropolis officers to deal with considerations concerning the app, unexpectedly. “It was fairly scary,” he says of the police involvement.
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