Reporting and Visualization Toolset Criteria

Problem space

Why are we doing this?

Problem statement

Current Ed-Fi Dashboards have proven difficult and costly to implement especially for smaller schools and districts that do not have the budget or technical expertise to handle implementation and maintenance.

Impact of this problem

Schools and small districts are not able to use our visualization tools to move towards data interoperability.

How do we judge success?

The "free" reporting and visualization tool should1:

  • Be easy
    • Require minimum technical/development skills to install and customize (e.g. javascript, html, other?)
    • Provide a programmatic method to develop content (e.g., API, scripting languages, etc...)
    • Include a GUI-based method to develop content (e.g., browser or desktop application based)
  • Be extensible
    • Allow users to define additional visualization types as modules with resource re-use where applicable
    • Integrate with existing technology stacks and be flexible and durable enough to grow with the organization
  • Be collaborative
    • Allow organizations to easily share, compare, and distribute content with out distributing the underlying data
  • Be "free"1
    • Core offering should use open source resources
    • Core offering should allow or be a source for OTS tools like PowerBI, Tableau, etc.
  • Be scalable
    • Provide access to content to as many or as few users as desired without requiring massive computing infrastructure to support it
    • Perform well enough with minimal hardware to keep cost/overhead sustainable
  • Be secure
    • Implement role-based permissions for content access
    • Implement row-based security for data access
  • Be cost effective
    • No licensing fee
    • Reduced maintenance requirements
    • Breaks reliance on third party integrators/services

What are possible solutions?

Draco

Vega

Polestar

Lyra

Do not include native GUIs -

Altair

Shiny

D3.js

Observable Notebooks

1 Free in this context comes from Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation where free really means software that provides end users with the freedom to modify the source/software to meet the needs of the user.  This means that paid software, like MS PowerBI, can be free if it provides a way for end users to modify functionality to suit their needs.  

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