Washington state is a leader in Alternative Learning Experiences, public schools that teach in unique ways. In order to manage the requirements imposed by the State office of public education, ALEs must use some form of a Student Information System (SIS).

Most ALEs in the state subscribe to a closed-source SIS: Wings; most school districts and program administrators have either no knowledge of open source SIS, or are the subject of FUD from vendors like Wings.

I'd like to develop a document comparing & contrasting open source SIS on features, maintainability, extensibility, community, and package and provide a simple recipe for starting at least one open SIS server.

Example systems:

• OpenSIS
• Fedena
• RosiaroSIS
• Centre/SIS
• SchoolTool