Can Open-Source Infrastructure Move the Market?

This is no fairy tale. The budding young programmer is one, Chris Alfano. The innovative school is Philadelphia's Science Leadership Academy and its school leader is Chris Lehmann.

The open-source school “mainframe 2.0” is Slate, supported by Chris’s local dev shop, Jarvus. And yes, innovation is live and kicking in Philadelphia. For schools that are dealing with long-term, restrictive software agreements or that lack the time and talent to rethink their technology implementation, this anecdote may sound as fanciful as calling on the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion for backup support. Even still, open-source infrastructure --platforms, portals, mainframes, whichever sounds least threatening -- carries some serious promise for education innovation that to-date has won most of its marketplace success by merely automating the status quo.

And then there’s data privacy and ownership. What education company explicitly advertises full data portability --that is, the option to download your school or student data, and then permanently wipe it from the product’s database? With open-source products, educators decide when, where, and how data gets moved, stored and shared.