Tech Town Hall & the 2018 Bootcamp

By Stephen Fuqua, Ed-Fi Alliance Technical Team

We just wrapped up the 2018 Technical Bootcamp as part of the Ed-Fi Summit. The Bootcamp is a two-day event where we dig into the technical details, provide hands-on training and demonstrations, and get feedback from the technical community on challenges they’d like to address and improvements they’d like to see made. We had a number of sessions geared specifically toward local education agencies (LEA), state education agencies (SEA), and vendors. You can see the full session schedule in the Tech Docs Ed-Fi Events space.   

One of the most anticipated and valuable Bootcamp sessions each year is our Tech Town Hall. This was a great opportunity for our technical users to give us candid feedback about what’s working and what we can improve on. A handful of themes emerged from the discussion, and these are the work areas the Ed-Fi team and Community will be considering for 2019 technical work:

• Lowering infrastructure cost through the use of open source tools (especially databases) 
• Triggering system and/or user notifications based on ODS events
• Formalizing and extending the new Analytics Middle Tier
• Providing mechanisms for validating API request data 
• Enhancing the traceability of ODS data through source tagging 

These topics showcase that this Community is engaged and wants to push the Ed-Fi technical solutions in exciting directions. A great way to follow progress on these issues is to log new tickets or upvote existing ones in Tracker. 

For more notes on the discussion, please see 2018 Bootcamp Tech Town Hall Report in Tech Docs. Thanks for joining us at this year’s event!