Ed-Fi Special Interest Groups

Project Meadowlark is a research and development effort to explore potential for use of new technologies, including managed cloud services, for starting up an Ed-Fi compatible API.

Special Interest Group goals:

1. Provide input to requirements and design.
2. Provide review and feedback of "product" demonstrations.
3. Make recommendations, as appropriate, to the Ed-Fi Alliance about future technology choices.

The CCMR SIG will convene community members to:

1. Provide input into and feedback on the Alliance’s work to support CCMR use cases in the data standard and technology through delivery of a CCMR-focused starter kit.
2. Discuss the current source data availability to answer these CCMR questions.
3. Confirm priorities in the college, career, and military components of CCMR.
4. Confirm end user roles that will benefit from using the CCMR Starter Kit.

The goals of the SIG are as follows:

1. Identify and prioritize primary use cases for LMS data within the Ed-Fi community
2. Provide input into and feedback on the Alliance's work to deliver a Starter Kit focused on LMS data and on the LMS Toolkit more generally
3. Provide direction on the overlap of the current Gradebook data domain with the evolving LMS data model and review the Gradebook model generally.

1. Gather input on opportunities for expansion and improvement of the data model particularly those changes needed by active field work.
2. Recommend changes to the data model and standards artifacts to assist the community in greater adoption and usage and remove roadblocks. 

The goals of this special interest group are to produce a set of architecture and maintenance recommendations for containerized distribution of the Ed-Fi ODS / API platform and platform tools, suitable for deployment on products like Docker or other container technologies).

These recommendations will address elements like:

• which container platforms and environments to target for such distributions
• which elements of the Ed-Fi platform should be containerized services, and how those services should be decomposed
• what are the interfaces common across services (e.g. logging) and what configuration options should exist for those
• if there are other architecture components that could be shared by the community (e.g. load balance or caching containers)
• how often to apply OS patches or other procedures for ongoing maintenance

The goals of the Special Interest Group are to:

1. Gather input on opportunities for expansion and improvement of the data model and API, particularly those changes needed by active field work
2. Recommend changes to the data model and related standards artifacts to assist in greater adoption and usage, and remove roadblocks

The goals of this Special Interest Group are to convene community experts to:

• Collect and document data out use cases

• Review and prioritize community needs and use cases in this area

• Provide actionable recommendations for the Ed-Fi Technology Roadmap

The goals of this Special Interest Group are to convene community experts to:

1. Review and provide input to the deliverables from the Alliance-sponsored work
2. Identify an Ed-Fi implementation to adopt one of the proposed approaches to data validation. 
3. Identify an Ed-Fi implementation that can serve as a testbed for implementation of the Validation API - which involves (a) technical implementation of the Validation results API and (b) working with one or more SIS vendors to integrate their products with the API.

The goals of this Special Interest Group are to convene community experts to:

• Define and refine use cases around the integration of Ed-Fi and Google Classroom.
• Propose technical solutions to enable prioritized use cases.

The initial use cases in scope are:

• Rostering Google Classroom from the Ed-Fi ODS / API
• Pushing notifications based on Ed-Fi data into Google Classroom

The Ed-Fi Alliance will convene a special interest group (SIG) with the following objectives in mind:

• The Alliance will convene a group of active and participating members around the usage of a technology solution to import non-API data sources in the Ed-Fi ODS / API.
• Members will be expected to install, configure, map local data sources, import, test, quality check, and report results with pre-release versions of the Data Import solution.
• Members will be expected to participate in SIG conference calls and electronic exchanges to share experiences and help shape future development priorities (scheduled to begin the week of February 18, 2019).
• Member attendees of the 2019 Ed-Fi Tech Congress will be invited to attend an in-person convening for this SIG.

The goals of this Special Interest Group are to convene community experts to:

• discuss the design proposed by Arizona DOE for record level ownership and authorization in the Ed-Fi ODS / API, and provide recommendations on implementation or alternative designs
• consider if there are adjacent use cases that could leverage the same model, and invite community members with similar use cases to participate in the design recommendations so as to maximize the possibility that a record level ownership options would be broadly useful and become part of Ed-Fi core technology

The Special Interest Group (SIG) on “Open Source Databases and Database Diversity” will work to define and shape community activity in the area of open source and other database platforms. Specifically, it will

1. review and prioritize community needs and use cases in this area
2. provide actionable recommendations for the Ed-Fi Technology Roadmap specifically
3. provide recommendations for the Ed-Fi Community member work in this area more broadly (for example, for community members or field projects pursuing implementations on other database platforms)

Querying the Ed-Fi ODS is very challenging due to its highly-normalized structure. This is often a stumbling-block for creation of reporting solutions and adoption of analytics self-discovery tools. The Ed-Fi Alliance is publishing a technical paper analyzing this yawning gap between data storage and data reporting, and providing concomitant architectural recommendations and patterns for overcoming that gap. The paper particularly focuses on provision of data to an Early Warning System, although the patterns will easily support other use cases in the future.

We call the proposed solution the Analytics Middle Tier. This Special Interest Group (SIG) is being convened to solicit community feedback on the proposed architecture, with the goal of publishing the final report before the Ed-Fi Summit in October.

This special interest group (SIG) has a few goals:

• Provide an initial content for data model collaboration for education agencies, including suggestions/proposals for the core data model and sharing of extension models.  
• Provide a context to discuss other ODS/API technologies or information to support the community and agencies in the move to Ed-Fi Suite 3.
• Provide a current stream of technical and related information for agencies interested in moving to Ed-Fi Suite 3.

The primary goal of this special interest group is to get real world, community feedback on multi-year use cases, to inform a decision of whether to incorporate T-ODS into Ed-Fi Core (or release it via the Ed-Fi Exchange).

Gather input from vendors actively integrating with the ED-FI RFC 8 - ASSESSMENT OUTCOMES MANAGEMENT API (Inactive) in order to make changes to the underlying assessment domain model and API structures in order to support exchange of assessment data via REST API. The SIG was driven by vendor reports / tickets published in the Ed-Fi Tracker, and was limited to vendors actively in technical implementations against the Ed-Fi assessment specifications.

The RESTful ODS API, operating on a highly normalized data model, has proven inefficient for secure access to large amounts of data. Community members have also voiced interest in alternatives to the current XML specifications, both as XML is perceived as heavyweight and with a desire to re-use designs and code from current Ed-Fi REST API clients (which consume and produce JSON).

This Special Interest Group will document use cases and review design work-in-progress related to synchronization or transfer of large data sets via REST API.