
Ask HN: Let's make an open source/free SaaS platform to tackle school forms - busymichael
I have 4 kids. I am filling out all the start of school forms for each kid. I have to fill out these same forms each year. Are you doing the same thing? Let&#x27;s make this year the last year we are manually filling out forms -- let&#x27;s build a SaaS platform for school forms. Community built, open-sourced, free.<p>Brief sketch of the idea: survey monkey + docusign, but with a 100 pre-built templates for K-12 school situations. Medical emergency form. Carpool form. Field trip permission form. Backend gives schools an easy way to customize and track forms. Forms are emailed to parents and filled out online. Parent&#x27;s information is saved so that any new form is pre-filled in with as much known info as possible.<p>Anyone feeling the same pain? Anyone want to join with me and do it?
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codingdave
I've been developing apps for the school systems for years now. There are
existing systems that can handle their forms. The tech isn't the problem.
Implementation, and making it easy for all levels of staff in a district to
use are the challenges you would need to resolve. Sending papers home with
kids and getting completed papers back is archaic and unreliable... but easy
on teachers.

Also, keep in mind that not all families have computers. Not all parents have
email. A solution that doesn't work for the low income, or homeless children,
is a non-starter.

The idea is good... I'm not trying to discourage it. Just that the problems
that need solved likely are not what you think they are.

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ian0
I also work with schools (including registration) and agree fully with
codingdave. The problems are almost always related to practical not technical
issues in education.

That said, Id love to support an open source solution that school providers
(be it formal companies or people helping out) could use. Offline upload (eg
by admins scanning docs at the school) is a must, also mobile support (where I
am most parents have phones, very few have laptops)

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bifrost
Oh man, I'm in the midst of some of this right now. Theres no dowloadable form
for certain things because they want it on identical sizes and types of
paper... I have terrible handwriting and its killing me.

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badrabbit
For work stuff,docusign already solves this. Why are schools not on docusign?
Budgets? For the same reason they may not subscribe to your potential startup?

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busymichael
Not a startup. Free service for schools, parents. Built by parents, community-
run, not for profit.

I think the real problem is incentive: the school has no incentive to digitize
the form - it is easy for them to just copy the old form and send it out each
year. If we build a database of common forms and give parents/schools easy
ways to digitize old forms, it gets them over the hurdle.

Plus, docusign, etc. don't build a structured database with the data to make
it easy to access.

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matt_s
If the incentive were financial based on the cost per copy of printing, a
10,000 student school with .02 per copy is still only $200 to print a paper
form per kid.

You're also talking about collecting personal data (contact info, medical
info, etc.) digitally which brings on a whole mess of laws for this free
service to deal with.

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tmaly
Sort of, my daughters school just needs the tech help. A solid online FAQ that
is maintained would be more valuable to me

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westurner
Technically, a checkbox may qualify as a digital signature; however,
identification / authentication and storage integrity are fairly challengeable
(just as a written signature on a piece of paper with a date written on it is
challengeable)

Given that notarization is not required for parental consent forms, I'm not
sure what sort of server security expense is justified or feasible.

How much does processing all of the paper forms cost each school? Per-student?

In terms of storing digital record of authorization, a private set of per-
student OpenBadges with each OpenBadge issued by the school would be easy
enough. W3C Verified Claims (and Linked Data Signatures) are the latest
standards for this sort of thing.

We could evaluate our current standards for chain of custody in regards to the
level of trust we place in commercial e-signature platforms.

The school could send home a sheet with a QR code and a shorturl, but that
would be more expensive than running hundreds of copies of the same sheet of
paper.

The school could require a parent or guardian's email address for each student
in the SIS Student Information System and email unique links to prefilled
forms requesting authorization(s).

Just as with e-Voting, assuring that the person who checks a checkbox or tries
to scribble their signature with a mouse or touchscreen is the authorized
individual may be more difficult than verifying that a given written signature
is that of the parent or guardian authorized to authorize.

AFAIU, Google Forms for School can include the logged-in user's username; but
parents don't have school domain accounts with Google Apps for Education or
Google Classroom.

How would the solution integrate with schools' existing SIS (Student
Information Systems)? Upload a CSV of (student, {student info}, {guardian
email (s)})? This is private information that deserves security, which costs
money.

Which users can log-in for the school and/or district to check the state of
the permission / authorization requests and PII personally-identifiable
information.

While cryptographic signatures may be overkill as a substitute for permission
slips, FWIW, a timestamp within a cryptographically-signed document only
indicates what the local clock was set to at the time. Blockchains have
relatively indisputable timestamps ("certainly no later than the time that the
tx made it into a block"), but blockchains don't solve for proving the key-
person relation at a given point in time.

And also, my parent or guardian said you can take me on field trips if you
want. [https://backpack.openbadges.org/](https://backpack.openbadges.org/)

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billconan
why not google form?

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busymichael
The problem isn't that schools don't have options, it is that they don't have
the incentive. The easy thing for them to do is just send out the same old
paper forms. We need to build the template database and give parents the tools
to do the form conversion.

