Ed-Fi Dashboards Eval 2019-07-24 Meeting notes

Itzel Torres

• Summary and survey responses to the Dashboard Destiny https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Y7fd8DFXNJQ5QKfKMquRivdfBw3zMKD1

Notes:

• Survey mentions customization as a reason for high cost, would like to get a better sense of the level and type of customizations in current implementations were done.
• How dashboards were customized/extended depends on the version of the dashboards. Earlier 1.x versions did not have the plugin architecture available so they were not as easy to share. Itzel Torres will reach out to implementations to get an overview of their implementation experience and lessons learned.
• Lessons learned from Wyoming and Indiana:
  • From v2.x on the code base offers better ways to extend the dashboards, but it is still a big effort to extend in a way that can be packaged to be shared with other implementations and in a way that core is not affected. 
  • Extensions affect the build/deploy process depending on how these extensions are implemented. Security packages and configuration on servers sometimes block deployment scripts making managing extensions and deployment a bit more challenging.
  • Technical staff is getting harder to find and onboard.
  • Smaller districts do not have the technical staff to take on maintenance or troubleshooting of dashboards.
  • Security is a big issue, some of the options available in the marketplace offer better visualization but are not easily integrated with the security requirements.
• There are more options available for visualization than 5 years ago, should the community:
  • Build a custom solution that allows implementations to customize? This will mean longer maintenance costs and a heavy investment.
  • Build a basic offering for smalle/low resource community members with a framework that makes it easier for others to build upon? This should be lower cost to build and maintain but would not offer as much functionality or extensible options.
  • Is the marketplace ready to provide enough cost effective options?