The AlekSIS project stand at didacta has attracted many interested parties from various areas of school digitalization this year. Our team was asked several times about the stand’s outstanding position, even before talking about the software itself: Compared to competitors, our visitors commented positively that our stand evidently presented solutions and that it was clear to see what AlekSIS stands for. The developers and support staff, who covered a wide range of knowledge about AlekSIS at the stand, were then able to quickly enter into open and fruitful conversation. The visitors learned to appreciate that, as an open source project, we are genuinely interested in exchange and feedback.
Among the approximately 200 conversations that we had at the stand during didacta, we have been able to make out three particular groups of interested parties:
During the live demo of the new user interfaces in AlekSIS, the team also recorded more than 20 concrete suggestions for improvement as well as some feature requests, some of which have been evaluated, scheduled or even implemented during the trade fair.
For the future viability and distribution of AlekSIS in general-education schools in Germany, didacta offered the necessary networking opportunities. For instance, the project management team was able to gain insights into the new central school management software of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and, together with its project management, develop concrete ideas for integration with AlekSIS as well as to promote exchange with Puavo and UCS@School as potential partners, who also provide solutions for schools based on free software.
In order to collect quantitative data about the needs in the digital school organization, the visitors were able to fill out two surveys: firstly, a requirements survey with which we want to determine which functions are currently perceived as particularly important or necessary, regardless of the new functions of AlekSIS, and secondly, a feedback survey on the new functions of AlekSIS, which we were showing live at the stand. On top of the 200 people we talked to, more than 100 visitors participated in the quantitive survey.
The requirements for and current status of digital school organization, which were communicated to us mainly by teachers and school principals, were strikingly uniform:
We are pleased with the feedback on the innovations in AlekSIS, which we presented as a priority this year:
With the help of the dialogue at didacta and the quantitative survey, our team will next have a strategy workshop to discuss how we can best meet the requirements and make use of the opportunities. The core issue should be the prioritization and design of development work with regard to political developments in the creation of nationwide school management platforms, as well as economic feasibility.
Economical implementation can be made possible through public funding, especially if there is a sufficiently large-scale need for an issue, as well as through financing from school authorities or municipal service providers. Functions that turn out to be a niche issue are already being offered to individual (pilot) schools so that they can also contribute financially to the development.
Through our presence at didacta, we have experienced that AlekSIS is now perceived significantly beyond its ideological advantages of open development and digitally sovereign operation and is particularly suitable for schools that learn and work more progressively or flexibly than the majority of public schools. In addition to broad provision of AlekSIS through school authorities, targeted collaboration with independent schools could also play a more important role in the future.
Apart from the efforts of our team, our presence at didacta was made possible by various partners and sponsors. We would particularly like to thank the NLnet Foundation, which specifically co-financed the assessment of requirements for the future viability of the project as part of the NGI0 funding, as well as velocitux UG, the partner company for AlekSIS software development, which covered the costs for the stand decoration and merchandise items.
The possibility to exhibit their product at a leading trade fair like didacta is not a given, especially for an open source project that remains true to its core values even after 5 years of development and is essentially purely non-profit and voluntary. Any expenses that come from the project budget need to be carefully thought out. However, as a school information system, AlekSIS has a special role: through its use in general education, it can lay an important foundation for sovereign, open and informationally self-determined digitalization, through which young people can access software that is not offered by large, profit-driven companies. However, the decision to use AlekSIS does not fundamentally rest with its individual end users. A representation that matches its commercial competitors represents an important building block in the development of AlekSIS as a fundamental, digitally sovereign solution and thus the advancement of an open digitization attitude from the outset.
