Prepare perspective database scheme proposal to accomodate first data points (time-related) in SDF

[xekc]

Elements of Schools Description Framework will aim to accommodate a rationally humanistic perspective on educational institutions and all organisations working with children.

Our current database schema:

• needs to be re-thought with schools data taking clearly central space in our priorities, in our architecture, in our value delivery. The result of this task is a markdown document with illustrations, briefly describing changes needed, perspective structure. Nothing too extreme and everything realistically simple and imperfect: we are able to go for a year or two accumulating technical debt and validating our current set of assumption through a set of performance or quality compromises.

Yet we want to make the first step towards crowdsourcing data describing the school environment - data, that will allow us facilitate learning, experience and best practice exchange between schools.

[xekc]

@indeyets I'll aim to involve external people into this within next 2-3 weeks to give us more perspectives and create the space to discuss various possible approaches professionally. I'd like to approach it on a foundation of OpenData/LinkedData philosophy, possibly with RDF/Schema.org-like specification, links to other W3C standards - but within lowest possible time budget / overall complexity we can have.

We want a data model robust enough to accomodate such detailed data for up to about 500 schools - and that would be our scale limit we'd lock ourselves on this pilot stage.

We'll collect information about a limited number of best schools so that all other schools within the system could model and compare their internal practice / experience, relying on practice in "demonstration schools", "example schools" in our system. Whenever governments launch education change programs - they also involve a limited number of schools in it, and on LibertySoil we'll allow our users to crowdsource (through voting / information submissions) the list of schools that we all, as a global community, want to follow.

Our emphasis is on non-academical perspective and non-utilitarian philosophy in education that values humanistic, socio-emotional development of the child - above the development of his economic potential as a workforce material, university/college material etc. Data we collect (and empower our users to collect) will be the main manifestation of our philosophy. We won't store academic achievement data points - but will accumulate and make visible other perspectives on general wellbeing, feeling of safety, protected safe environment for growth, play, evolvement in your own direction at your own pace - provided within a school setting.

[xekc]

I'll need to re-open this as a smaller task, this has too wide scope and relies on incomplete and vague SDF that hasn't been thought through yet.