What's new?

What’s new? This blog post, that’s what. This is the first whatsnew post and man, plenty is new. I will never forget an idle moment in the exhibit hall at NAIS in Montreal six years ago when one of my counterparts from another websitesforindependentschools company approached me during a lull in the action and asked, “Hey Mark, what keeps you up at night?” I said something about rising blue cross premiums and making payroll. “What about you,” I asked. “What keeps me up at night is the certainty that someday, someone is going to give all of this s**t away for nothing.” I thought I was going to be sick. I wondered at the time, who in the world would ever do such a thing? All of us in the school website business were spending a ton of money building, supporting, extending, and maintaining our systems, and the notion that someone would create a comparable system and give it away for nothing was, for me, incomprehensible. My counterpart, however, saw it coming. So who would it be? It turns out to be us--newschoolyard.  

So we put his quote right on the newschoolyard home page, on our NAIS six-years-later exhibit hall booth, our print collateral, everywhere. We cleaned it up slightly. It makes quite an impression in marketing materials, but beyond that, we think it really matters. What surprised me then was that such a thing was possible. What surprises me today is that such a thing didn’t happen two or three years ago. If ever there was an environment where a robust open source solution should have taken off like seniors on spring break, independent school web sites would seem to have been the place. Innovative, collaborative, for-the-greater-good labor--stretching across two dozen time zones--allowing communication between just about anyone. The open source software movement is as good as it gets in terms of a real-life application of so many of the values that we strive to include in our mission statements. Don’t get me wrong, open source has long been alive and well in independent schools; certainly many schools have embraced moodle, and for obvious reasons. It is robust, it’s users contribute to its development, it is all about the central kernal of our schools--teaching and learning. It is open source at its finest.

We don’t want to be moodle, but we are emulating that open source model for school websites. We have compiled a really cool system that is part Drupal core, part Drupal contrib modules, and part newschoolyard scripted solutions. We’ve wrapped these solutions into an independent school-specific system that is available to use as an engine for building a school website at no charge. Any new work that we do is given back to the Drupal community, and a percentage of our monthly service fee is donated to the Drupal Foundation. It does cost money to run newschoolyard, and our revenue model is based on the assumption that most schools will choose to have us service their websites going forward for a reasonable and affordable fee, though this is by no means required. We are looking for five Founder Partner schools to get this initiative off the ground. We began talking to schools last week and two of those five Founder Partner spots are gone...so get on it.

I’m going to sign off on this inaugural blog post now, but before I do I’d like to point out an example of textbook irony, for those of you preparing for the SATs. Those payroll number and blue cross premiums that kept me up at night in 2004? They were put to rest when my counterpart’s concerns saw the light of day. Our development team is comprised of the thousands of developers worldwide contributing to Drupal every day, and our payroll and blue cross numbers are exponentially smaller as a result.