Stockholm’s war on interoperability

An object lesson in how (not) to resolve the tension between comcom and privacy.

The city of Stockholm commissioned Skolplattform, an omnibus app to deliver timely information to students, teachers and parents. It was a mess: a late, SEK 1B (USD 117M) “IT disaster” boondoggle with a 1.2 star rating.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=se.stockholm.vardnadshavare&hl=en&gl=US

Among the groups that were poorly served by the app were parents, and among those parents was Christian Landgren, a software developer. Landgren created a streamlined version of the app just for parents that he dubbed Öppna (open) Skolplattformen. As the name suggests, it was free/open source software, hosted on Github:

https://github.com/kolplattformen/skolplattformen

Öppna Skolplattformen worked because Landgren and his collaborators reverse-engineered the Skolplattformen, discovering the URLs and syntax for its private API. That may sound daunting, but it’s something web developers do all the time — their primary sources were the web developer tools built into Chrome!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.skolplattformen.app&hl=en_GB&gl=US