How did the developer of the app, an alternative to the 'Official City of Miserable App', get a police investigation?
These parents built a school app. Then the city called the cops | Ars Technica
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/11/these-parents-built-a-school-app-then-the-city-called-the-cops/
Skolplattformen is an app developed to technically support all educational systems, from attendance registration to grade recording, to make life easier for parents, teachers and children. The city of Stockholm started the Skolplattformen development project in 2013 and was released as the official app of the city of Sweden in August 2018. The app is a complex system with 18 individual modules maintained by 5 external companies, used in 600 preschooler facilities and 177 schools, but at the root of 'doesn't work'. There was a problem.
Skolplattformen cost 1 billion Swedish kronor (about 13.2 billion yen), but parents, teachers and children are dissatisfied with the complexity of the system due to reports of delays in system startup and project management mistakes. Is leaking. Parents seem to find it extremely difficult to even 'check what they need to bring in class' and 'contact sick leave,' with an unusually low rating of 1.2 for Android apps and 1.1 for iOS apps.
Therefore, Christian Landgren, who runs an innovation consulting company in Sweden and is a parent who also has children, started developing 'an alternative app to Skolplattformen' in November 2020. Landgren formed a team with two colleagues who are also software developers and parents with children, and developed an alternative application ' Öppna skolplattformen (Open School Platform) ' that calls and executes the API used by Skolplattformen. bottom.
Öppna Skolplattformen
https://skolplattformen.org/
Released on February 12, 2021, Öppna Skolplattformen is a parent-only alternative app, unlike Skolplattformen, which is also used by teachers and children. Parents can log in using the Swedish digital ID system BankID, which is also used by Skolplattformen, to check school schedules, events, grades, teacher notifications, cafeteria menus, and report children's illness. It is also possible to perform operations such as doing.
All of this information is captured via Skolplattformen's API, and co-developer Johan Öbrink said, 'What we display in Öppna Skolplattformen is all public information.' At the time of writing the article, the average rating of both Android apps and iOS apps exceeded 4.0, and the ratings from parents far exceeded the official apps in the low 1s. Öppna Skolplattformen is also open sourced on GitHub as an open source license, making the code available to the city authorities as well as the private sector.
However, the city of Stockholm did not welcome Öppna Skolplattformen, but warned Landgren even before the app was released, saying it 'may be an illegal app.' After the app was released, it reported to data protection authorities that 'the app may be accessing personal information illegally' and blocked access to potential personal data at the end of February. Implemented a security update for Skolplattformen. This shut down the API used by Öppna Skolplattformen, but it seems that the Öppna Skolplattformen side also updated and made the API available again, and for several months after that, 'Skolplattformen will update and Öppna Skolplattformen will also support'. It was said that the cat-and-mouse game continued.
In early April, city officials demanded that Öppna Skolplattformen keep the GitHub source code private, and on April 15, the Stockholm City Department of Education 'legally investigated the system.' a result, there is a concern of data breach on the basis of the criminal law, 'the announcement . During the move, Landgren met with Stockholm City Education officials to address app concerns, but Stockholm reported Öppna Skolplattformen to police and Landgren and others were investigated. It has become. 'This was pretty scary,' Landgren said, but the Department of Education and the police said that an investigator who visited him asked a rudimentary question, 'What is an open source app?' There are doubts about the investigation conducted by.
The development of Öppna Skolplattformen was advanced even during the investigation, and up to 40 volunteers were involved in the development, and they were engaged in work such as fixing bugs and adding search functions. As a result, Mr. Åsa Sköldberg led the police investigation team of the 'we do not think are involved criminals to Öppna Skolplattformen' in August mentioned , data Stockholm city of Öppna Skolplattformen in September Announced that access was granted. However, a few days before this contact, Skolplattformen made a security update and was blocking the API of Öppna Skolplattformen.
The change in policy by the city of Stockholm has allowed Öppna Skolplattformen to enter into an official contract with the city. Landgren didn't originally develop Öppna Skolplattformen to monetize, but he wants the city to sign an app license to pay volunteers for their contributions. In addition, Öppna Skolplattformen has already attracted attention from outside Stockholm, and the authorities of Gothenburg , Sweden's second largest city, are also in talks with parents. Landgren says the team is working on a new version of the app.
Sweden is the birthplace of tech startups such as Spotify and Klarna, but a 2019 report states that public sector digitization is the lowest in the OECD countries. Landgren argues that politicians and governments should not procure the services they provide to their citizens as huge IT projects, but rather with people who actually use the services, such as Öppna Skolplattformen, involved in the development. bottom.
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