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So, in the world of education, students with special needs (gifted, having learning differences, etc) are legally required to have things called Individual Education Plans in the US. Plenty of companies serve web solutions to manage IEPs for some insane amount. Long story shorter:
I've found an open-source web based IEP management program here: http://iep-ipp.sourceforge.net/ . I have built an appliance with the new Lucid Beta and it looks like I can easily manage to produce a TKLPatch to patch either the LAMP stack or the Lucid beta.
My most obvious concern isn't a show stopper: Could the TKL community benefit from such an appliance? All of our contributions were predicated on the appliances being useful for education. But this one is quite specialized. If it can't serve TKL in any manner, I can still make use of it in the TKLPatch primer have thrown together.
My next concern is the last revision was 1.0.006, in June of 2007. I've emailed the contact person through sourceforge, if nothing else than to help with documentation. It's been two weeks and there hasn't been a response.
Does anyone think it's of value to put a patch together for this? And if so, should I wait for a Lucid Lamp stack, use the Lucid beta, or go with the Hardy stack?
Oh and if you happen to come across other FOSS IEP management solutions, please give me the heads up - we're looking to adopt one.
Highly specialized abandonware
Unfortunately for every successful, vibrant open source project there are many who have been abandoned by their creators. This looks to be the case. The good news is that it's open source so if it's useful to you and others in your situation it may be more economical to pick up the ball and maintain this project than to start from scratch or pay for a proprietary service.
I would guess whether or not that makes sense depends on how much resources could be pooled together by those who are interested in this.
Feel free to make a TKLPatch for this even if it only serves a highly specialized niche need. In this case I'm guessing you are the most qualified person around to judge whether something like this could be of value to the educational community.
Note that sometimes it's very difficult to anticipate what kind of response an open source offering is going to get. You can only try and see what happens.
The Plan
Our IEP coordinator and tech coordinator are going to look closely at the application, which I"ve set up on a small server. They're gonna looks to see especially if it handles our needs given contemporary legislation. If it does, we could very well adopt it.
If they decide it's quality is such that we can utilize it, I'll go ahead and build a patch for it. It can be posted to a forum, or linked to my host. Hopefully it's good as is; hopefully other schools in our situation will want to learn more. And perhaps we develop it.
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