Re: [school-discuss] SIF - A second glance

[Doug Loss <drloss@suscom.net>]

Felipe Bergo wrote:

> Now, how about making up our own free, open standard ? Schoolforge is made
> up of LOTS of organizations that deal with education, once we have a
> specification, making it noticed by every other computer people and some
> standards boards shouldn't be that tough.

I agree.  I don't think SIF is widely used at the moment; this may be just the
time to come up with an open alternative.  However, I think we need to have
some way of transitioning from whatever we do to SIF, to give us a way of
insinuating ourselves into SIF-heavy environments.  This might just be an app
that has an [whatever we call our stuff] agent on one end and a SIF agent on
the other, running as a gateway between the two systems.

> Now, what do we need that is most blatantly lacking in SIF's data model ?
> Is there anything in there that we don't need at all ?

There's a lot of stuff in SIF we never thought about, like transportation
stuff for school bus routes and nutrition stuff for cafeteria menus.  We may
want to emulate that, or to ignore it for the moment.

> (and I still have the words "Chief Vertical Evangelist" stuck in my
> throat. The idea of a room full of vertical evangelists, one of them
> being called chief, makes me sick)

I tend to think of vertical evangelists as evangelists who haven't drunk
enough yet to become horizontal evangelists.  The chief would be the one
wearing the American indian war bonnet, wouldn't he (or she)?

--
Doug Loss                 All I want is a warm bed
Data Network Coordinator  and a kind word and
Bloomsburg University     unlimited power.
dloss@bloomu.edu                Ashleigh Brilliant