28 ms·

Stockholm parents built their own school app, then the city called the cops

568 points by hakonbogen 5y ago

mistrial9 5y ago
it is arguable that an entire generation of Western adolescents has been traumatized by social media, so why stop there? next up, elementary school
- mistrial9 5y ago
  draws a picture of a Godzilla monster (who is the computer community and their funding enablers) breathing fire-databases on children-in-groups
- antiterra 5y ago
  I can’t find any the information in the article that describes or suggests social media functionality. Do you have any information on this?
neop1x 5y ago
What a shame! In my opinion publicly accessible API is simply public. The can attempt to block access from "un-approved" clients server-side but that's it. It is like saying my website is accessible only from Firefox and it is illegal to access it from Chrome or Safari.
assbuttbuttass 5y ago
The most hilarious part is the official app was built by five different contracting companies. No wonder the thing was a mess.
- coldcode 5y ago
  A long time ago some teammates (prior to my joining the company) had been assigned to work on some VA related health system, turned out they were 8 levels sub contractors, i.e. sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-contractors. Project never shipped.
  - aneutron 5y ago
    It still boggles my mind how ANYONE would sign off on a setup like this. How does no one see that this will fail without a single doubt.
    - jazzyjackson 5y ago
      because no one has a view of the whole system.
  - moogly 5y ago
    What I want to know: did they have to fill in their time reports in 8+ systems, one worse than the other? When I was a subcontractor, the most I had to do was 3 (customer and 2 consultancies), and even that was a major hassle.
    - NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
      >What I want to know: did they have to fill in their time reports in 8+ systems, one worse than the other? OMG, I do not miss filling out three fucking timesheets as a salaried employee. One via MS Access, which was believe it or not, the least painful. One on fucking paper, because why shouldn't programmers use paper for timesheets? And last, but definitely not least one via PHONE. Where you have to enter your employee number and hours via a fucking PHONE KEYPAD. Oh, and they would nag a company of 250,000 to do it early so that the accounting team of like 5 could go home on time on Friday. One of the many reasons I don't miss that job.
- namdnay 5y ago
  "best of breed" + "we want to avoid vendor lock-in" :(
- TrackerFF 5y ago
  Seems on par with most state-sponsored IT project here in Scandinavia. Big consulting firms involved, billions spent, horrible products shipped.
- bink 5y ago
  This was the first thing that jumped out at me as well. I've worked on govt. contracts and when you put >1 contractor on the same project they become competitors. They will sabotage each other in the hopes of winning a larger share in the future. And beyond that they have absolutely no incentive to help each other. Their managers aren't going to pay them to make the other contractors code work better.
zmix 5y ago
> "[...] But you have to involve students, and especially teachers, in the development from the start. There has been none of that in the School Platform.” Oh my! I can imagine some bureaucrats playing "Lord-Master of Administration", enjoying the small power, they have, while burning through tax provided money and, generally, making a career. There may be sides, I do not understand, but, from the article, it just looks like this.
rootusrootus 5y ago
Perhaps Jeff Bezos wasn't the first person to think of it, but I give him credit for the decision to turn every single internal Amazon service into an API. Obviously it worked splendidly for monetizing it, but as a guideline I really appreciate the idea. The better the APIs a project has, the better the quality of interaction with other development. In the end this just raises the tide for everyone.
- contingencies 5y ago
  Yes, this is one of the best Bezos observations. Manage as you program: create well-defined interfaces. If there's value, there's a fair chance you can export it as a spinoff business.
- cerved 5y ago
  Program to interfaces not implementations
  - worldsayshi 5y ago
    Hmm, I'm not quite following. Curious how this comment tie in with the one above?
dakr 5y ago
For $117 million they could have hired administrators at each school to field phone calls from parents and take care of records.
mvarrieur 5y ago
This should probably link directly to the article: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/sweden-stockholm-school-app-open-source https://www.wired.co.uk/article/sweden-stockholm-school-app-...
donkarma 5y ago
Schools should NOT have applications, what a mistake
- castis 5y ago
  Could you go into more detail on why you think this?
  - wyager 5y ago
    Not him, but I can take a guess: 99% of apps suck and are horrible to work with. Government apps are probably worse than average. Interacting with the government shouldn’t require the use of any particular tech device. It sounds like in this case there is no alternative. Schools have managed for hundreds of years without this additional complexity, so there’s probably not a good justification to start adding this complexity now. Usually school/government initiatives like this are just driven by hype/someone wanting to make an “impact”/nepotistic job provision/etc.
    - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      "Schools have managed for hundreds of years without this additional complexity" Thats why they managed so well when COVID came along and remote schooling became nessesary.
  - em500 5y ago
    I'm not the OP, and not so opinionated. But (as the parent of an elementary school kid) I can see where the sentiment is coming from. I'm not familiar at all with this Swedish Skolplattform, but from the description in the article, it sounds to me like a solution (or maybe a city budget) in search of a problem. It's pretty unclear what the purpose and scope of this Skolplattform is. The article description of the open-source alternative reads > The app shows school calendars and events such as music concerts, a daily schedule for pupils, notifications from teachers that link out to grades and news updates, food that’s being served in cafeterias, and an option to report if children are sick. Apart from privacy sensitive student specific stuff like grade reports (which our school does on paper), it seems all this stuff can be published just as well on the school website, email lists and/or paper brochures. I really don't see the need for a separate phone app here. Our school does have a school-specific app for some limited school <-> parent and parent <-> parent messaging, and scheduling the occasional parent-teacher meetings. In my experience it doesn't do anything better than plain old email.
rockbruno 5y ago
Funny that they were so concerned about GDPR violations given that in Sweden everyone's address/job/phone/salary is public and easily accessible. I like it that every time a foreigner joins my company (I live in Sweden) it's a matter of time before they post a message in our Stockholm channel saying "guys... what the hell is this website and why am I in it?". Then the swedes mention that they see nothing wrong with it while the foreigners playfully call them crazy. Every single time.
- wonderwonder 5y ago
  I think the complaint was more of a way for the state to save face. Much like with the recent incident in the US where the governor asked the police to investigate a reporter that revealed the state website was embedding social security numbers in the application. Reporter was accused of hacking even though it was clearly an issue with the site.
- merpnderp 5y ago
  Salary? How could that being public serve the public's interest? As a privacy advocate that does pique my curiosity.
  - cerved 5y ago
    not salary, taxable income, which got most people is pretty much their salary
  - AndrewDucker 5y ago
    It's considered necessary for a just society that if people are going to earn massive salaries that people are aware of it. Salary transparency allows people to negotiate with all the facts.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Information asymmetry distorts markets, and the job market is really important not just for the people involved but overall economic efficiency.
  - 5y ago
capableweb 5y ago
> The work started at the end of November 2020, just days after Stockholm’s Board of Education was hit with a 4 million SEK ($456,658) GDPR fine for “serious shortcomings” in the Skolplattform. Integritetsskyddsmyndigheten, Sweden’s data regulator, had found serious flaws in the platform that had exposed the data of hundreds of thousands of parents, children, and teachers. In some cases, people’s personal information could be accessed from Google searches. (The flaws have since been fixed and the fine reduced on appeal.) $400K sounds like nothing when it comes to something this serious, but then the fine also got reduced? Reduced to what I wonder, and for what?
- wonderwonder 5y ago
  I don't really understand the fine, its a board of education so are the funds taken from public school funds? Seems wrong to take money from a school district.
  - kalleboo 5y ago
    One would hope their contract with the developer assigns the liability to them
raxxorrax 5y ago
> In some cases, people’s personal information could be accessed from Google searches. SEO providers should take a note here. > It warned parents to stop using the app and alleged that it might be illegally accessing people’s personal information If your API allows data extraction, it probably isn't a fault of any client. Perhaps they meant that creators could steal credentials. A problem with any software. I think this digital child managing system sounds moderately dystopian to be honest. I would have hated to give my parents access to anything like this. Kids will of course learn from how their parents behave... An open API is a must in my opinion, but the rest of the App should be open source too. That said, I don't really see the Swedish strategy as a model for other countries to follow. You don't need to give children chromebooks to learn. These are skills they have already mastered far better than their parents. They will learn about domain specific apps and there are indeed some really good ones, but such platform can also limit creativity because they are essentially sandpits. Depending on age that might be appropriate, but kids may have greater ambitions than their parents.
- wonderwonder 5y ago
  "I think this digital child managing system sounds moderately dystopian to be honest" I disagree, I have 2 kids in elementary school and it is very useful to be able to look up what the kids have scheduled for the day to determine what to dress them in, see what's for lunch and if I need to pack them something if they won't like the available option. Most importantly though its very helpful to look up what homework / tests are due as the kids tend to not manage this so well themselves. It also allows me to check their grades. Its not so much a "child managing system" as a way for the parents to be empowered to ensure their kids are doing well and what is going on in their school lives. As a parent, my kids are my responsibility, any tool I can use to be better at that is a good thing.
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    As I said, as a kid I would have hated this. I don't think kids benefit from this kind of overbearing parenting in the long run. Better than being neglected, I guess. Perhaps this is useful for very young children, but knowing myself I would have broken out of there as quickly as possible.
petermcneeley 5y ago
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing illegal.
- abnry 5y ago
  On the other hand, that is a very good excuse for those who want to do evil.
  - Aromasin 5y ago
    Or for tricking good people into doing evil.
    - tata71 5y ago
      "Don't worry, everybody takes the juice!"
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    No, the whole point of the quote is that Illegal does not equate evil. Helping slaves escape was illegal
literallyaduck 5y ago
Government should learn from that self organized teams who work for passion build better software. Authoritarian dictators mandating a poor solution vs self lead, self organized, committed parents building a piece of software they will instantly dogfood.
- enumjorge 5y ago
  I agree with the main point of your comment but calling the people trying to shut this down “authoritarian dictators” erodes the meaning of the phrase.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    s/authoritarian dictators/power hungry, desperate to remain in power/
    - addicted 5y ago
      Or, far more likely, people who don’t understand this stuff worried that they are gonna get sued because they let private data be accessed illegally. And I’m sure the vendor they paid a billion to also had sales people insisting that what the open source people were doing was illegal.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Please. If those in charge allowed the passionate to do these kinds of things, they wouldn't remain in charge. Authoritarian dicators not required.
  - themitigating 5y ago
    Because there's only two levels 1. Passionate that produces amazing software 2. Completely don't care
    - dylan604 5y ago
      In a nut shell, yes, but I'd modify the groupings: 1) Passionate people that rally others, 2) everyone else. Whether you utterly don't care, midly care but not enough to do anything, or care enough to do something only when someone goes first, it is the passionate people that preach to the choir because that's how you get them to sing.
taylodl 5y ago
The first thing that jumps out is Sweden has a national identity system, BankID. The APIs appear to be protected using those credentials. With that in mind I have two questions: 1. Who owns the data? 2. Should public funds be used for the creation of private APIs that manage the data? The answer to (1) has consequences for (2). I think many HN readers, including myself, and certainly these parents would argue that the data is the property of the parents. If you see the data as being the property of the parents then you would see the APIs as being the means for retrieving and manipulating your data - data that's protected by this national BankID identification. It appears the school system believes the data is their data, and not the parents' data. Therefore retrieving the data through any other means than the "official" app is a potential data breach. So who is right? Think about the data we manage on behalf of our customers, for example. Who owns that data? What rights do our customers have in accessing and managing that data? This is a really interesting case and hopefully will force the answer to these questions.
- urvader 5y ago
  (I am Christian Landgren, cofounder of the project) You are right, the city believes they have ownership of the data, mainly because they fail to understand that they aren’t showing data in an app, but rather publishing data in an API. In Swedish law, once you have released data from a government, the receiver have the right to do whatever they want with the that data (as long as it isn’t violating any other laws). The city in this case is responsible to check that the data is safe to share publicly and once they have- the data is not theirs. This is regulated in the constitutional law regulating free speech which goes back to year 1766. This means that they can’t really apply the same logic as a private company can when publishing data in their api. A private company can still keep license over what can be done with the data they publish. A city can not do that because of these constitutional laws.
  - scoot 5y ago
    Hi, congrats on the app. I was curious about one thing in the article - why would the city pay to license the app when it is open source? Do you anticipate that this would be cheaper for them than them paying one of their overpriced contractors to build and publish an "official" version, given how much they spent on a CRUD app?
JackFr 5y ago
"We don't have an open API" Sure you do. You just don't know it yet.
- tantalor 5y ago
  This could be a variant of http://hyrumslaw.com http://hyrumslaw.com JackFr's law: With sufficiently angered users of a private API, they will build an better, open API around it.
  - lovecg 5y ago
    Plaid
  - tata71 5y ago
    The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. John Gilmour
- moffkalast 5y ago
  Like twitch's unexpected open source offsite code backup.
  - aneutron 5y ago
    I audibly chuckled at your comment. Thanks for the laugh !
- henrikschroder 5y ago
  Even before the open app came along, people found enormous security holes in the system, because they were essentially operating with security-by-obscurity. It was super embarrassing for the city, they had to close the system for days while fixing it. The official system has a mobile app, where it takes effort to figure out the API, and a SPA web app, where it is absolutely trivial to see which endpoints it is hitting and how. And the ridiculousness of the city's defense that it's not open is made greater by the fact that if they had made an open API from the start, security should have been baked in from the start, which means they would have avoided embarrassing security incidents along the way. They already have all the components needed for a proper, public API. They're so close, and yet they're insisting that it's private, and that it's illegal to access their private API.
ed25519FUUU 5y ago
114 million dollars for the original app! I almost can’t believe how bad an inefficient our government is sometimes.
locallost 5y ago
> 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. > The Skolplattform, which has cost more than 1 billion Swedish Krona, SEK, ($117 million), has failed to match its initial ambition. So JIRA for Schools failed. It's a top down system, where people on top decide to solve problems for all people below, without really knowing how to solve it, or what the problem even is. And then contractors get involved. People are willing to put up with this if you can press them, e.g. they are at work, they are in the army etc. so they have to put up with it, but it's not going to work for anything else. It attempts to solve everything for everyone, where it's questionable if most of these things are even worth solving. E.g. from the article, what is somebody's child doing in school, what do they need in gym class. You might just ask them, no? There are quarterly or so meetings with the teacher to discuss things, progress, problems? The problem is not that the menus are convoluted, but that maybe most of this stuff is not worth categorizing, not worth having an UI other than a piece of paper.
- dangerface 5y ago
  Its difficult to evaluate the value of the info, if no one can find it because its buried in menus then yes it is useless but that doesn't mean it cant be useful, in general if its worth printing its worth putting on your website. I don't get the point of non web apps because usually they are just a subset of the website.
- chasil 5y ago
  What is particularly insulting is the needless API/URL changes made in the official app in order to sabotage the efforts of the parents. The Google Play listing should have had a "Mismanagement Count" prominently displayed that incremented every time this happened. The log, and the time spent, should be in court. The parents decided to build this front end for free. They did not decide to play hide and seek with the interfaces, and for this they deserve compensation.
  - 5y ago
ess3 5y ago
Ah the joy of public procurement in Sweden. It's basically an extremely long requirement gathering process where the company the can promise the most for the least amount of money wins. Only problem is that the people ordering this are not the users and they just want to cover their backs, meaning that behemoths usually win because they're more trustworthy. I was in edu-tech world for a while in Sweden. The most frustrating thing is that even if you have a good product that your users enjoy you will fail because you can't sell it to individual schools. You have to sell it to all the schools in the entire county, which just means that some giant actor will swoop in promise the world for a dollar and then we have this.
- henrikschroder 5y ago
  The silliest part of the story is that Stockholm decided to build their own system, mostly because of dick-swinging reasons, because the actual needs of schoolchildren and parents across the country aren't that different! It should be perfectly possible to have the same underlying system across the entire country. And in a perfect world, there would be some kind of common API for all schools, and a competing app ecosystem where parents and teachers and children can pick the one they like the best.
mindslight 5y ago
> To do so, the city struck a deal with an external provider that will be able to set up licenses between Öppna Skolplattformen and the city. “With this solution, the City of Stockholm can guarantee that personal data is handled in a correct and secure way, while parents can take part in the market’s digital tools in their everyday lives” Licensing does nothing to guarantee that your systems are secure, and the overall law is what enforces the correct handling of personal data by outside parties. But in this paper pusher's head, anything she cannot control through a contract must be a threat. And so she will spend public money wielding the police department against individuals actually building stuff, to force them into signing her safety blanket of a contract. In 2021, it behooves us to remember that this type of gatekeeper used to be in control of nearly every technology organization - empty suits who knew nothing technical, thinking security is about checking off certifications and qualifications. It was a rare gem to find someone with a clue who held enough organizational pull to set policy. I remember having a meeting with the head of the campus network at my university, who was concerned about me running Linux on my own machine. He just couldn't understand the point of Linux - he could never trust it because "there is no one to sue". As if suing Microsoft would have ever been a sensible path. But that was his worldview - how do you think he responded to security reports? But the thing that we need to realize in 2021 is that it's not like these people just left and found honest jobs - their existence was eclipsed by the much larger technical-first community. They're still out there, controlling their little fiefdoms, reacting in the same destructive ways to stop themselves from looking "bad". And with the calcification of technology, they might even be poised for a comeback.
- tm-guimaraes 5y ago
  > He just couldn't understand the point of Linux - he could never trust it because "there is no one to sue" Well, I guess enterprises can just "buy" linux from RedHat/Suse and get some corp to sue.
  - mindslight 5y ago
    That past interaction stuck with me so hard, I definitely think of companies selling services around Free software in those terms. From my adult perspective it's an understandable business dynamic, but we shouldn't be condoning it from public servants.
zivkovicp 5y ago
City officials are just upset because it has the potential to disrupt the flow of their corrupt / dirty money. Simple as that.
jderick 5y ago
The movie "Brazil" remade in modern day Sweden.
GhettoComputers 5y ago
Monopolies hate competition, they’re terrified of better products, and a free open source version is better than their squandered tax program. Why are the defending their own poor quality program? Do they want Sweden to fail?
- andai 5y ago
  I'm reminded of the lukewarm response Microsoft had to refterm.
- henrikschroder 5y ago
  The only reason they're defending their shit is prestige at this point. The system was originally procured by city administrators who had way too little understanding and experience dealing with IT projects. The contract was awarded to one of the big consultant behemoths who specialize in winning government contracts and executing them shoddily. Parents hate it, because it is shit. Anyone in the industry with a brain hates it, and laughs at it, because it is shit. Elected city politicians hate it, because it is shit, and their voters are constantly telling them it is shit. But the vendor is of course defending their contract and the sweet, sweet tax money they're getting. And the people with power to actually do something about it, unelected city administrators, are defending it, because they feel they have to double down on their earlier shit decisions.
  - MichaelZuo 5y ago
    Can the crown, or some superior authority, pension off ‘city administrators’ in Sweden as they please?
    - henrikschroder 5y ago
      No, that's not how it works. Sweden has separations of power like every other liberal democracy, but the cake isn't cut the same way as it is in the US. Government offices are much more independent and protected from political interference than in the US, for example. Basically, elected city officials set the budget and general guidance, and can appoint some administrators, but most people on the administrative side rise up through the ranks based on their merits (or not) like in any other organization. The current head who is ultimately responsible for how the thing is handled right now started her career as a teacher, became a principal, and then moved into the city's school administration. I'm sure she's great at those parts of her job, but she's obviously not competent enough when it comes to overseeing or procuring IT projects of this magnitude. So it's not the case that someone incompetent was rewarded with a comfy position, it's that the city's organization as a whole isn't competent to handle projects of this type and size.
ashton314 5y ago
> User-driven IT development is interesting but must work together with legislation and responsibility for secure personal data [sic] To legislators, everything is a legislative problem to be solved with legislation. Government must be democratic, but boy it would be so helpful if those in office knew enough about technology to be a little more humble.
drcongo 5y ago
Every edutech platform I've ever had to use (UK, with 3 kids going through school) is an abomination, the whole sector needs disrupting. My current nemesis is Iris Parentmail [0], a convoluted jumble of javascript that presents the user with a challenge - try to read the apparently important message the school has sent you before Parentmail crashes your browser. If the message is particularly long, then there's an end of level boss where you have to try to read the whole thing before the laptop gives you third degree burns. HNers, please, disrupt the hell out of this sector because it's nothing but chancers, consultants and chancer consultants. [0] https://www.iris.co.uk/education/engagement-suite/iris-parentmail/ https://www.iris.co.uk/education/engagement-suite/iris-paren...
- pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
  For anyone who's been burned by these: Why aren't you equally as mad at the personnel at your child's school? It's one thing for a national or semi-national rollout of broken enterprise junk, it's another thing for your child's instructor to go along and demand that you use this broken system instead of providing reasonable affordances (e.g. low-tech, paper-based notices/forms that get sent home with your kid). For that matter, how do your school systems handle the situation where no one in the household is able or willing to install the damn thing because e.g. you don't own an iOS or Android device, or you have no smartphone at all? Is there an actual legal requirement for you to contribute on an ongoing basis to the bottom-line of select tech companies like Apple and Google in order to participate in public life—as if it's on par with the necessity to pay for e.g. renewing your government-issued ID?
  - pfortuny 5y ago
    You should not underestimate the power of “ISO-9000” in European institutions (including schools) and the “necessity” of an official “document trail” of everything. I lecture at a Uni and it has not reached me yet but am expecting it.
  - rndgermandude 5y ago
    >it's another thing for your child's instructor to go along and demand that you use this broken system instead of providing reasonable affordances I am not sure, but it might be that the teachers are not only encouraged but required to use these systems? >you don't own an iOS or Android device, or you have no smartphone at all? Is there an actual legal requirement for you to contribute on an ongoing basis to the bottom-line of select tech companies like Apple and Google in order to participate in public life—as if it's on par with the necessity to pay for e.g. renewing your government-issued ID? That really became a problem here in Germany, when politicians proclaimed that "digital/remote learning" will safe the day in covid times. Not realizing that a lot of kids, especially in the poor neighborhoods, nor their parents, actually have any capable devices for that. Or fast enough internet (with enough mobile data) to support zoom meetings and such each day.
renewiltord 5y ago
It’s a government system. Of course it’s shit. When private systems are shit, they die. When gov systems are shit they attract more funding. The simple dynamic of negative monetary feedback for shitness in private enterprise and positive monetary feedback for shitness in government determines this entirely.
pmdulaney 5y ago
This is a bit off-topic, but why are magazines doing so much better in the UK than here in the US? Why is the spinoff UK version of WIRED so much better than the original US version? Is it just the case that the Brits have more of an appreciation for print culture than we do?
- throwaway2331 5y ago
  Americans don't read.
  - pmdulaney 5y ago
    (sigh) Yeah, that's probably most of it...
- kalleboo 5y ago
  Maybe due to public transport?
  - pmdulaney 5y ago
    You may have something there. I myself do most of my reading on my commuter bus.
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
This is not a story about failure - it's common and unremarcable both in government and corporate. This story is amazing because it shows society at it's best, people got together organised and resolved a common problem. They did this without corporate or government power structures. We should remember importance of this third institution and cherish it, it gets little lime in the limelight, and it's the most precious of them all.
psyc 5y ago
It isn’t only grass roots amateurs who fail at this. Once upon a time, there was a medium sized org in a galaxy sized company, that set out to make a Moodle/Blackboard-like, but for all ages, and “cool” (like they knew what that was). The designers were teachers, and the VP was a former god damned state superintendent of schools. Seems like they should have known better. When the time came to shop around for a test site, it quickly became apparent that the app was sort of inherently illegal, and even if it were not, there was no chance of it getting past the bureaucracy. The VP was fired, and the whole org was absorbed into other parts of the company.
- SilasX 5y ago
  Illegal on what basis? Data privacy, like in the story or something else?
  - psyc 5y ago
    I believe most if not all of it would have boiled down to data collection rules for kids. Some of that may have been specific to schools. The extent of those rules meant you could not simply bring the app into compliance without destroying a lot of the innovative parts.
teawrecks 5y ago
"It warned parents to stop using the app and alleged that it might be illegally accessing people’s personal information." If that is possible, then your API is at fault. Period.
aenis 5y ago
It would be interesting to know what contractor delivered the original $120m mess, and actively sabotaged open source efforts. The combination of large budget and terrible result suggest some of the very large contractors used to doing work for fortune 500 companies. Shame on those who work there.
- yummybear 5y ago
  Are we shaming employees for company choices? Who works at companies who haven't done questionable actions?
  - Fordec 5y ago
    I can't speak for you, but for me, I actually audit the company before accepting a job offer for and I'm proud of the conduct of every position and team I have been a part of. You can't buy reputation, which extends to who you choose to associate with.
  - aenis 5y ago
    Yes. I'd not do it, and I am sure many other would rather look for a different job (which is not difficult) than engage in such acts. Its a personal choice to work for companies acting immorally.
- kakoni 5y ago
  Well originally there were 4; TietoEvry, Nova Software, Ping Pong and Itslearning [1] [1] https://axbom.se/oppna-skolplattformen-stockholm/ https://axbom.se/oppna-skolplattformen-stockholm/
zzo38computer 5y ago
Open APIs is what we need because too many programs are badly designed. Unfortunately, the API may also be badly designed, but sometimes it is OK. Designing the open API may also avoid the data breach due to making less likely that the design is not designed in the way to cause such a breach, I should expect. User interfaces seem bad enough that I think it might be better to design the API primarily and even only the API; you can then just use that. If it is simple enough, it can be used from command-line interfaces, and others, easily enough if a protocol is designed well enough to support such multiple uses in a simple way. (It can even make the form automatically too, with the user's display settings rather than using the form author's CSS or whatever.) However, they also should not require schools to use such a app, especially to require one of their locked systems only. You can do education without it, too. That doesn't mean such a system is useless (you can use it if you find it useful), only that it is possible to work without it, too. They didn't used to have such a app in the school and shouldn't require it now either; it can be voluntary.
xputer 5y ago
Clear demonstration of why initiatives such as "public money public code" are so important. https://publiccode.eu/ https://publiccode.eu/
superjan 5y ago
If someone publishes info on how your API’s work that should not be a security problem unless you “implement security” client side. That would also explain the request to takedown the github repo, as well as why the API suddenly changes.
tomohawk 5y ago
To err is human. To really screw things up, you need a computer or government. Adding both in at once? Watch out!
m0zg 5y ago
Wait, I was told the Nordic governments are the pinnacle of governance and they can do no wrong. Was I misled? This sounds worse than local governments here in the US. Spending $117M and 5 years to put out something that doesn't work, and then fighting any attempts to fix the situation - if you didn't mention the country, most people would have just assumed it's us. :-)
silexia 5y ago
The core issue here is that we ask governments to do too much. Governments are mediocre at doing things when they begin, and usually always end up mired in corruption and bureaucracy later on. This is just another example of that. Private organizations have their own failings, but at least when they fail they can be penalized or go bankrupt. There is no mechanism like bankruptcy for the government and so we are stuck with an agency forever once it is started.
madmod 5y ago
In high school I reverse engineered my school grading system portal (Skyward) and made an app to help me prioritize assignments by their impact on my GPA. In the process I found that there were almost no permissions enforced. I made a typo in my user id number in a python test script and boom there was someone else's transcript! I set up a meeting with my principal and after much shade being thrown by the school district I proved to them it was a legit issue.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lbriner 5y ago
I wonder why a department with a large budget manages to make something so terrible but I think I know the answer. Every time I work with a bureaucracy, I realise there are a lot of people, many of whom are average at best but all want to make their mark on the product, have their say, cement their value to the organisation. Whoever then has to build it produces something rubbish by definition, not because they are bad devs but because they have to do what they are told. Sad really that when we have done so much work on making the development process super slick and agile, we haven't been able to formalise the interface between customer and suppliers to avoid conflicting requirements and inconsistent UX. Unless someone has solved this but most of us don't know how?

568 points by hakonbogen 5y ago

it is arguable that an entire generation of Western adolescents has been traumatized by social media, so why stop there? next up, elementary school

mistrial9 5y ago
draws a picture of a Godzilla monster (who is the computer community and their funding enablers) breathing fire-databases on children-in-groups
antiterra 5y ago
I can’t find any the information in the article that describes or suggests social media functionality. Do you have any information on this?

neop1x 5y ago

What a shame! In my opinion publicly accessible API is simply public. The can attempt to block access from "un-approved" clients server-side but that's it. It is like saying my website is accessible only from Firefox and it is illegal to access it from Chrome or Safari.

assbuttbuttass 5y ago

The most hilarious part is the official app was built by five different contracting companies. No wonder the thing was a mess.

coldcode 5y ago
A long time ago some teammates (prior to my joining the company) had been assigned to work on some VA related health system, turned out they were 8 levels sub contractors, i.e. sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-contractors. Project never shipped.
- aneutron 5y ago
  It still boggles my mind how ANYONE would sign off on a setup like this. How does no one see that this will fail without a single doubt.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    because no one has a view of the whole system.
- moogly 5y ago
  What I want to know: did they have to fill in their time reports in 8+ systems, one worse than the other? When I was a subcontractor, the most I had to do was 3 (customer and 2 consultancies), and even that was a major hassle.
  - NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
    >What I want to know: did they have to fill in their time reports in 8+ systems, one worse than the other? OMG, I do not miss filling out three fucking timesheets as a salaried employee. One via MS Access, which was believe it or not, the least painful. One on fucking paper, because why shouldn't programmers use paper for timesheets? And last, but definitely not least one via PHONE. Where you have to enter your employee number and hours via a fucking PHONE KEYPAD. Oh, and they would nag a company of 250,000 to do it early so that the accounting team of like 5 could go home on time on Friday. One of the many reasons I don't miss that job.
namdnay 5y ago
"best of breed" + "we want to avoid vendor lock-in" :(
TrackerFF 5y ago
Seems on par with most state-sponsored IT project here in Scandinavia. Big consulting firms involved, billions spent, horrible products shipped.
bink 5y ago
This was the first thing that jumped out at me as well. I've worked on govt. contracts and when you put >1 contractor on the same project they become competitors. They will sabotage each other in the hopes of winning a larger share in the future. And beyond that they have absolutely no incentive to help each other. Their managers aren't going to pay them to make the other contractors code work better.

zmix 5y ago

> "[...] But you have to involve students, and especially teachers, in the development from the start. There has been none of that in the School Platform.” Oh my! I can imagine some bureaucrats playing "Lord-Master of Administration", enjoying the small power, they have, while burning through tax provided money and, generally, making a career. There may be sides, I do not understand, but, from the article, it just looks like this.

rootusrootus 5y ago

Perhaps Jeff Bezos wasn't the first person to think of it, but I give him credit for the decision to turn every single internal Amazon service into an API. Obviously it worked splendidly for monetizing it, but as a guideline I really appreciate the idea. The better the APIs a project has, the better the quality of interaction with other development. In the end this just raises the tide for everyone.

contingencies 5y ago
Yes, this is one of the best Bezos observations. Manage as you program: create well-defined interfaces. If there's value, there's a fair chance you can export it as a spinoff business.
cerved 5y ago
Program to interfaces not implementations
- worldsayshi 5y ago
  Hmm, I'm not quite following. Curious how this comment tie in with the one above?

dakr 5y ago

For $117 million they could have hired administrators at each school to field phone calls from parents and take care of records.

mvarrieur 5y ago

This should probably link directly to the article: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/sweden-stockholm-school-app-open-source https://www.wired.co.uk/article/sweden-stockholm-school-app-...

donkarma 5y ago

Schools should NOT have applications, what a mistake

castis 5y ago
Could you go into more detail on why you think this?
- wyager 5y ago
  Not him, but I can take a guess: 99% of apps suck and are horrible to work with. Government apps are probably worse than average. Interacting with the government shouldn’t require the use of any particular tech device. It sounds like in this case there is no alternative. Schools have managed for hundreds of years without this additional complexity, so there’s probably not a good justification to start adding this complexity now. Usually school/government initiatives like this are just driven by hype/someone wanting to make an “impact”/nepotistic job provision/etc.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    "Schools have managed for hundreds of years without this additional complexity" Thats why they managed so well when COVID came along and remote schooling became nessesary.
- em500 5y ago
  I'm not the OP, and not so opinionated. But (as the parent of an elementary school kid) I can see where the sentiment is coming from. I'm not familiar at all with this Swedish Skolplattform, but from the description in the article, it sounds to me like a solution (or maybe a city budget) in search of a problem. It's pretty unclear what the purpose and scope of this Skolplattform is. The article description of the open-source alternative reads > The app shows school calendars and events such as music concerts, a daily schedule for pupils, notifications from teachers that link out to grades and news updates, food that’s being served in cafeterias, and an option to report if children are sick. Apart from privacy sensitive student specific stuff like grade reports (which our school does on paper), it seems all this stuff can be published just as well on the school website, email lists and/or paper brochures. I really don't see the need for a separate phone app here. Our school does have a school-specific app for some limited school <-> parent and parent <-> parent messaging, and scheduling the occasional parent-teacher meetings. In my experience it doesn't do anything better than plain old email.

rockbruno 5y ago

Funny that they were so concerned about GDPR violations given that in Sweden everyone's address/job/phone/salary is public and easily accessible. I like it that every time a foreigner joins my company (I live in Sweden) it's a matter of time before they post a message in our Stockholm channel saying "guys... what the hell is this website and why am I in it?". Then the swedes mention that they see nothing wrong with it while the foreigners playfully call them crazy. Every single time.

wonderwonder 5y ago
I think the complaint was more of a way for the state to save face. Much like with the recent incident in the US where the governor asked the police to investigate a reporter that revealed the state website was embedding social security numbers in the application. Reporter was accused of hacking even though it was clearly an issue with the site.
merpnderp 5y ago
Salary? How could that being public serve the public's interest? As a privacy advocate that does pique my curiosity.
- cerved 5y ago
  not salary, taxable income, which got most people is pretty much their salary
- AndrewDucker 5y ago
  It's considered necessary for a just society that if people are going to earn massive salaries that people are aware of it. Salary transparency allows people to negotiate with all the facts.
- Retric 5y ago
  Information asymmetry distorts markets, and the job market is really important not just for the people involved but overall economic efficiency.
- 5y ago

capableweb 5y ago

> The work started at the end of November 2020, just days after Stockholm’s Board of Education was hit with a 4 million SEK ($456,658) GDPR fine for “serious shortcomings” in the Skolplattform. Integritetsskyddsmyndigheten, Sweden’s data regulator, had found serious flaws in the platform that had exposed the data of hundreds of thousands of parents, children, and teachers. In some cases, people’s personal information could be accessed from Google searches. (The flaws have since been fixed and the fine reduced on appeal.) $400K sounds like nothing when it comes to something this serious, but then the fine also got reduced? Reduced to what I wonder, and for what?

wonderwonder 5y ago
I don't really understand the fine, its a board of education so are the funds taken from public school funds? Seems wrong to take money from a school district.
- kalleboo 5y ago
  One would hope their contract with the developer assigns the liability to them

raxxorrax 5y ago

> In some cases, people’s personal information could be accessed from Google searches. SEO providers should take a note here. > It warned parents to stop using the app and alleged that it might be illegally accessing people’s personal information If your API allows data extraction, it probably isn't a fault of any client. Perhaps they meant that creators could steal credentials. A problem with any software. I think this digital child managing system sounds moderately dystopian to be honest. I would have hated to give my parents access to anything like this. Kids will of course learn from how their parents behave... An open API is a must in my opinion, but the rest of the App should be open source too. That said, I don't really see the Swedish strategy as a model for other countries to follow. You don't need to give children chromebooks to learn. These are skills they have already mastered far better than their parents. They will learn about domain specific apps and there are indeed some really good ones, but such platform can also limit creativity because they are essentially sandpits. Depending on age that might be appropriate, but kids may have greater ambitions than their parents.

wonderwonder 5y ago
"I think this digital child managing system sounds moderately dystopian to be honest" I disagree, I have 2 kids in elementary school and it is very useful to be able to look up what the kids have scheduled for the day to determine what to dress them in, see what's for lunch and if I need to pack them something if they won't like the available option. Most importantly though its very helpful to look up what homework / tests are due as the kids tend to not manage this so well themselves. It also allows me to check their grades. Its not so much a "child managing system" as a way for the parents to be empowered to ensure their kids are doing well and what is going on in their school lives. As a parent, my kids are my responsibility, any tool I can use to be better at that is a good thing.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  As I said, as a kid I would have hated this. I don't think kids benefit from this kind of overbearing parenting in the long run. Better than being neglected, I guess. Perhaps this is useful for very young children, but knowing myself I would have broken out of there as quickly as possible.

petermcneeley 5y ago

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing illegal.

abnry 5y ago
On the other hand, that is a very good excuse for those who want to do evil.
- Aromasin 5y ago
  Or for tricking good people into doing evil.
  - tata71 5y ago
    "Don't worry, everybody takes the juice!"
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  No, the whole point of the quote is that Illegal does not equate evil. Helping slaves escape was illegal

literallyaduck 5y ago

Government should learn from that self organized teams who work for passion build better software. Authoritarian dictators mandating a poor solution vs self lead, self organized, committed parents building a piece of software they will instantly dogfood.

enumjorge 5y ago
I agree with the main point of your comment but calling the people trying to shut this down “authoritarian dictators” erodes the meaning of the phrase.
- dylan604 5y ago
  s/authoritarian dictators/power hungry, desperate to remain in power/
  - addicted 5y ago
    Or, far more likely, people who don’t understand this stuff worried that they are gonna get sued because they let private data be accessed illegally. And I’m sure the vendor they paid a billion to also had sales people insisting that what the open source people were doing was illegal.
dylan604 5y ago
Please. If those in charge allowed the passionate to do these kinds of things, they wouldn't remain in charge. Authoritarian dicators not required.
- themitigating 5y ago
  Because there's only two levels 1. Passionate that produces amazing software 2. Completely don't care
  - dylan604 5y ago
    In a nut shell, yes, but I'd modify the groupings: 1) Passionate people that rally others, 2) everyone else. Whether you utterly don't care, midly care but not enough to do anything, or care enough to do something only when someone goes first, it is the passionate people that preach to the choir because that's how you get them to sing.

taylodl 5y ago

The first thing that jumps out is Sweden has a national identity system, BankID. The APIs appear to be protected using those credentials. With that in mind I have two questions: 1. Who owns the data? 2. Should public funds be used for the creation of private APIs that manage the data? The answer to (1) has consequences for (2). I think many HN readers, including myself, and certainly these parents would argue that the data is the property of the parents. If you see the data as being the property of the parents then you would see the APIs as being the means for retrieving and manipulating your data - data that's protected by this national BankID identification. It appears the school system believes the data is their data, and not the parents' data. Therefore retrieving the data through any other means than the "official" app is a potential data breach. So who is right? Think about the data we manage on behalf of our customers, for example. Who owns that data? What rights do our customers have in accessing and managing that data? This is a really interesting case and hopefully will force the answer to these questions.

urvader 5y ago
(I am Christian Landgren, cofounder of the project) You are right, the city believes they have ownership of the data, mainly because they fail to understand that they aren’t showing data in an app, but rather publishing data in an API. In Swedish law, once you have released data from a government, the receiver have the right to do whatever they want with the that data (as long as it isn’t violating any other laws). The city in this case is responsible to check that the data is safe to share publicly and once they have- the data is not theirs. This is regulated in the constitutional law regulating free speech which goes back to year 1766. This means that they can’t really apply the same logic as a private company can when publishing data in their api. A private company can still keep license over what can be done with the data they publish. A city can not do that because of these constitutional laws.
- scoot 5y ago
  Hi, congrats on the app. I was curious about one thing in the article - why would the city pay to license the app when it is open source? Do you anticipate that this would be cheaper for them than them paying one of their overpriced contractors to build and publish an "official" version, given how much they spent on a CRUD app?

JackFr 5y ago

"We don't have an open API" Sure you do. You just don't know it yet.

tantalor 5y ago
This could be a variant of http://hyrumslaw.com http://hyrumslaw.com JackFr's law: With sufficiently angered users of a private API, they will build an better, open API around it.
- lovecg 5y ago
  Plaid
- tata71 5y ago
  The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. John Gilmour
moffkalast 5y ago
Like twitch's unexpected open source offsite code backup.
- aneutron 5y ago
  I audibly chuckled at your comment. Thanks for the laugh !
henrikschroder 5y ago
Even before the open app came along, people found enormous security holes in the system, because they were essentially operating with security-by-obscurity. It was super embarrassing for the city, they had to close the system for days while fixing it. The official system has a mobile app, where it takes effort to figure out the API, and a SPA web app, where it is absolutely trivial to see which endpoints it is hitting and how. And the ridiculousness of the city's defense that it's not open is made greater by the fact that if they had made an open API from the start, security should have been baked in from the start, which means they would have avoided embarrassing security incidents along the way. They already have all the components needed for a proper, public API. They're so close, and yet they're insisting that it's private, and that it's illegal to access their private API.

ed25519FUUU 5y ago

114 million dollars for the original app! I almost can’t believe how bad an inefficient our government is sometimes.

locallost 5y ago

> 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. > The Skolplattform, which has cost more than 1 billion Swedish Krona, SEK, ($117 million), has failed to match its initial ambition. So JIRA for Schools failed. It's a top down system, where people on top decide to solve problems for all people below, without really knowing how to solve it, or what the problem even is. And then contractors get involved. People are willing to put up with this if you can press them, e.g. they are at work, they are in the army etc. so they have to put up with it, but it's not going to work for anything else. It attempts to solve everything for everyone, where it's questionable if most of these things are even worth solving. E.g. from the article, what is somebody's child doing in school, what do they need in gym class. You might just ask them, no? There are quarterly or so meetings with the teacher to discuss things, progress, problems? The problem is not that the menus are convoluted, but that maybe most of this stuff is not worth categorizing, not worth having an UI other than a piece of paper.

dangerface 5y ago
Its difficult to evaluate the value of the info, if no one can find it because its buried in menus then yes it is useless but that doesn't mean it cant be useful, in general if its worth printing its worth putting on your website. I don't get the point of non web apps because usually they are just a subset of the website.
chasil 5y ago
What is particularly insulting is the needless API/URL changes made in the official app in order to sabotage the efforts of the parents. The Google Play listing should have had a "Mismanagement Count" prominently displayed that incremented every time this happened. The log, and the time spent, should be in court. The parents decided to build this front end for free. They did not decide to play hide and seek with the interfaces, and for this they deserve compensation.
- 5y ago

ess3 5y ago

Ah the joy of public procurement in Sweden. It's basically an extremely long requirement gathering process where the company the can promise the most for the least amount of money wins. Only problem is that the people ordering this are not the users and they just want to cover their backs, meaning that behemoths usually win because they're more trustworthy. I was in edu-tech world for a while in Sweden. The most frustrating thing is that even if you have a good product that your users enjoy you will fail because you can't sell it to individual schools. You have to sell it to all the schools in the entire county, which just means that some giant actor will swoop in promise the world for a dollar and then we have this.

henrikschroder 5y ago
The silliest part of the story is that Stockholm decided to build their own system, mostly because of dick-swinging reasons, because the actual needs of schoolchildren and parents across the country aren't that different! It should be perfectly possible to have the same underlying system across the entire country. And in a perfect world, there would be some kind of common API for all schools, and a competing app ecosystem where parents and teachers and children can pick the one they like the best.

mindslight 5y ago

> To do so, the city struck a deal with an external provider that will be able to set up licenses between Öppna Skolplattformen and the city. “With this solution, the City of Stockholm can guarantee that personal data is handled in a correct and secure way, while parents can take part in the market’s digital tools in their everyday lives” Licensing does nothing to guarantee that your systems are secure, and the overall law is what enforces the correct handling of personal data by outside parties. But in this paper pusher's head, anything she cannot control through a contract must be a threat. And so she will spend public money wielding the police department against individuals actually building stuff, to force them into signing her safety blanket of a contract. In 2021, it behooves us to remember that this type of gatekeeper used to be in control of nearly every technology organization - empty suits who knew nothing technical, thinking security is about checking off certifications and qualifications. It was a rare gem to find someone with a clue who held enough organizational pull to set policy. I remember having a meeting with the head of the campus network at my university, who was concerned about me running Linux on my own machine. He just couldn't understand the point of Linux - he could never trust it because "there is no one to sue". As if suing Microsoft would have ever been a sensible path. But that was his worldview - how do you think he responded to security reports? But the thing that we need to realize in 2021 is that it's not like these people just left and found honest jobs - their existence was eclipsed by the much larger technical-first community. They're still out there, controlling their little fiefdoms, reacting in the same destructive ways to stop themselves from looking "bad". And with the calcification of technology, they might even be poised for a comeback.

tm-guimaraes 5y ago
> He just couldn't understand the point of Linux - he could never trust it because "there is no one to sue" Well, I guess enterprises can just "buy" linux from RedHat/Suse and get some corp to sue.
- mindslight 5y ago
  That past interaction stuck with me so hard, I definitely think of companies selling services around Free software in those terms. From my adult perspective it's an understandable business dynamic, but we shouldn't be condoning it from public servants.

zivkovicp 5y ago

City officials are just upset because it has the potential to disrupt the flow of their corrupt / dirty money. Simple as that.

jderick 5y ago

The movie "Brazil" remade in modern day Sweden.

GhettoComputers 5y ago

Monopolies hate competition, they’re terrified of better products, and a free open source version is better than their squandered tax program. Why are the defending their own poor quality program? Do they want Sweden to fail?

andai 5y ago
I'm reminded of the lukewarm response Microsoft had to refterm.
henrikschroder 5y ago
The only reason they're defending their shit is prestige at this point. The system was originally procured by city administrators who had way too little understanding and experience dealing with IT projects. The contract was awarded to one of the big consultant behemoths who specialize in winning government contracts and executing them shoddily. Parents hate it, because it is shit. Anyone in the industry with a brain hates it, and laughs at it, because it is shit. Elected city politicians hate it, because it is shit, and their voters are constantly telling them it is shit. But the vendor is of course defending their contract and the sweet, sweet tax money they're getting. And the people with power to actually do something about it, unelected city administrators, are defending it, because they feel they have to double down on their earlier shit decisions.
- MichaelZuo 5y ago
  Can the crown, or some superior authority, pension off ‘city administrators’ in Sweden as they please?
  - henrikschroder 5y ago
    No, that's not how it works. Sweden has separations of power like every other liberal democracy, but the cake isn't cut the same way as it is in the US. Government offices are much more independent and protected from political interference than in the US, for example. Basically, elected city officials set the budget and general guidance, and can appoint some administrators, but most people on the administrative side rise up through the ranks based on their merits (or not) like in any other organization. The current head who is ultimately responsible for how the thing is handled right now started her career as a teacher, became a principal, and then moved into the city's school administration. I'm sure she's great at those parts of her job, but she's obviously not competent enough when it comes to overseeing or procuring IT projects of this magnitude. So it's not the case that someone incompetent was rewarded with a comfy position, it's that the city's organization as a whole isn't competent to handle projects of this type and size.

ashton314 5y ago

> User-driven IT development is interesting but must work together with legislation and responsibility for secure personal data [sic] To legislators, everything is a legislative problem to be solved with legislation. Government must be democratic, but boy it would be so helpful if those in office knew enough about technology to be a little more humble.

drcongo 5y ago

Every edutech platform I've ever had to use (UK, with 3 kids going through school) is an abomination, the whole sector needs disrupting. My current nemesis is Iris Parentmail [0], a convoluted jumble of javascript that presents the user with a challenge - try to read the apparently important message the school has sent you before Parentmail crashes your browser. If the message is particularly long, then there's an end of level boss where you have to try to read the whole thing before the laptop gives you third degree burns. HNers, please, disrupt the hell out of this sector because it's nothing but chancers, consultants and chancer consultants. [0] https://www.iris.co.uk/education/engagement-suite/iris-parentmail/ https://www.iris.co.uk/education/engagement-suite/iris-paren...

pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
For anyone who's been burned by these: Why aren't you equally as mad at the personnel at your child's school? It's one thing for a national or semi-national rollout of broken enterprise junk, it's another thing for your child's instructor to go along and demand that you use this broken system instead of providing reasonable affordances (e.g. low-tech, paper-based notices/forms that get sent home with your kid). For that matter, how do your school systems handle the situation where no one in the household is able or willing to install the damn thing because e.g. you don't own an iOS or Android device, or you have no smartphone at all? Is there an actual legal requirement for you to contribute on an ongoing basis to the bottom-line of select tech companies like Apple and Google in order to participate in public life—as if it's on par with the necessity to pay for e.g. renewing your government-issued ID?
- pfortuny 5y ago
  You should not underestimate the power of “ISO-9000” in European institutions (including schools) and the “necessity” of an official “document trail” of everything. I lecture at a Uni and it has not reached me yet but am expecting it.
- rndgermandude 5y ago
  >it's another thing for your child's instructor to go along and demand that you use this broken system instead of providing reasonable affordances I am not sure, but it might be that the teachers are not only encouraged but required to use these systems? >you don't own an iOS or Android device, or you have no smartphone at all? Is there an actual legal requirement for you to contribute on an ongoing basis to the bottom-line of select tech companies like Apple and Google in order to participate in public life—as if it's on par with the necessity to pay for e.g. renewing your government-issued ID? That really became a problem here in Germany, when politicians proclaimed that "digital/remote learning" will safe the day in covid times. Not realizing that a lot of kids, especially in the poor neighborhoods, nor their parents, actually have any capable devices for that. Or fast enough internet (with enough mobile data) to support zoom meetings and such each day.

renewiltord 5y ago

It’s a government system. Of course it’s shit. When private systems are shit, they die. When gov systems are shit they attract more funding. The simple dynamic of negative monetary feedback for shitness in private enterprise and positive monetary feedback for shitness in government determines this entirely.

pmdulaney 5y ago

This is a bit off-topic, but why are magazines doing so much better in the UK than here in the US? Why is the spinoff UK version of WIRED so much better than the original US version? Is it just the case that the Brits have more of an appreciation for print culture than we do?

throwaway2331 5y ago
Americans don't read.
- pmdulaney 5y ago
  (sigh) Yeah, that's probably most of it...
kalleboo 5y ago
Maybe due to public transport?
- pmdulaney 5y ago
  You may have something there. I myself do most of my reading on my commuter bus.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

This is not a story about failure - it's common and unremarcable both in government and corporate. This story is amazing because it shows society at it's best, people got together organised and resolved a common problem. They did this without corporate or government power structures. We should remember importance of this third institution and cherish it, it gets little lime in the limelight, and it's the most precious of them all.

psyc 5y ago

It isn’t only grass roots amateurs who fail at this. Once upon a time, there was a medium sized org in a galaxy sized company, that set out to make a Moodle/Blackboard-like, but for all ages, and “cool” (like they knew what that was). The designers were teachers, and the VP was a former god damned state superintendent of schools. Seems like they should have known better. When the time came to shop around for a test site, it quickly became apparent that the app was sort of inherently illegal, and even if it were not, there was no chance of it getting past the bureaucracy. The VP was fired, and the whole org was absorbed into other parts of the company.

SilasX 5y ago
Illegal on what basis? Data privacy, like in the story or something else?
- psyc 5y ago
  I believe most if not all of it would have boiled down to data collection rules for kids. Some of that may have been specific to schools. The extent of those rules meant you could not simply bring the app into compliance without destroying a lot of the innovative parts.

teawrecks 5y ago

"It warned parents to stop using the app and alleged that it might be illegally accessing people’s personal information." If that is possible, then your API is at fault. Period.

aenis 5y ago

It would be interesting to know what contractor delivered the original $120m mess, and actively sabotaged open source efforts. The combination of large budget and terrible result suggest some of the very large contractors used to doing work for fortune 500 companies. Shame on those who work there.

yummybear 5y ago
Are we shaming employees for company choices? Who works at companies who haven't done questionable actions?
- Fordec 5y ago
  I can't speak for you, but for me, I actually audit the company before accepting a job offer for and I'm proud of the conduct of every position and team I have been a part of. You can't buy reputation, which extends to who you choose to associate with.
- aenis 5y ago
  Yes. I'd not do it, and I am sure many other would rather look for a different job (which is not difficult) than engage in such acts. Its a personal choice to work for companies acting immorally.
kakoni 5y ago
Well originally there were 4; TietoEvry, Nova Software, Ping Pong and Itslearning [1] [1] https://axbom.se/oppna-skolplattformen-stockholm/ https://axbom.se/oppna-skolplattformen-stockholm/

zzo38computer 5y ago

Open APIs is what we need because too many programs are badly designed. Unfortunately, the API may also be badly designed, but sometimes it is OK. Designing the open API may also avoid the data breach due to making less likely that the design is not designed in the way to cause such a breach, I should expect. User interfaces seem bad enough that I think it might be better to design the API primarily and even only the API; you can then just use that. If it is simple enough, it can be used from command-line interfaces, and others, easily enough if a protocol is designed well enough to support such multiple uses in a simple way. (It can even make the form automatically too, with the user's display settings rather than using the form author's CSS or whatever.) However, they also should not require schools to use such a app, especially to require one of their locked systems only. You can do education without it, too. That doesn't mean such a system is useless (you can use it if you find it useful), only that it is possible to work without it, too. They didn't used to have such a app in the school and shouldn't require it now either; it can be voluntary.

xputer 5y ago

Clear demonstration of why initiatives such as "public money public code" are so important. https://publiccode.eu/ https://publiccode.eu/

superjan 5y ago

If someone publishes info on how your API’s work that should not be a security problem unless you “implement security” client side. That would also explain the request to takedown the github repo, as well as why the API suddenly changes.

tomohawk 5y ago

To err is human. To really screw things up, you need a computer or government. Adding both in at once? Watch out!

m0zg 5y ago

Wait, I was told the Nordic governments are the pinnacle of governance and they can do no wrong. Was I misled? This sounds worse than local governments here in the US. Spending $117M and 5 years to put out something that doesn't work, and then fighting any attempts to fix the situation - if you didn't mention the country, most people would have just assumed it's us. :-)

silexia 5y ago

The core issue here is that we ask governments to do too much. Governments are mediocre at doing things when they begin, and usually always end up mired in corruption and bureaucracy later on. This is just another example of that. Private organizations have their own failings, but at least when they fail they can be penalized or go bankrupt. There is no mechanism like bankruptcy for the government and so we are stuck with an agency forever once it is started.

madmod 5y ago

In high school I reverse engineered my school grading system portal (Skyward) and made an app to help me prioritize assignments by their impact on my GPA. In the process I found that there were almost no permissions enforced. I made a typo in my user id number in a python test script and boom there was someone else's transcript! I set up a meeting with my principal and after much shade being thrown by the school district I proved to them it was a legit issue.

deleted 5y ago

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lbriner 5y ago

I wonder why a department with a large budget manages to make something so terrible but I think I know the answer. Every time I work with a bureaucracy, I realise there are a lot of people, many of whom are average at best but all want to make their mark on the product, have their say, cement their value to the organisation. Whoever then has to build it produces something rubbish by definition, not because they are bad devs but because they have to do what they are told. Sad really that when we have done so much work on making the development process super slick and agile, we haven't been able to formalise the interface between customer and suppliers to avoid conflicting requirements and inconsistent UX. Unless someone has solved this but most of us don't know how?