A year later, School Finder launches (again)

Peter W
Code For Australia
Published in
4 min readDec 12, 2017

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Code for Australia’s open source schools tool just doubled its reach.

School Finder, South Australia style!

About a year ago, New South Wales rolled out their School Finder, a web app to help parents — living anywhere in the state, from Sydney to woop woop —to easily determine which school to send their child to.

Now, just a few months after open sourcing the tool, we’re excited to see it redeployed in South Australia — doubling the tool’s spread in Australia.

School Finder suggests the closest school but (as shown) also lets you explore

I’ll get back to South Australia in a minute, but want to quickly share some quirky backstory:

School Finder was a custom design/development project spearheaded by NSW DoE’s CESE and Code for Australia. The department had a strong sense of the problem they wanted to solve, which allowed an agile development process to proceed quickly. There was a lot of back and forth discussion happening between the designers, developers, and education stakeholders, with small tweaks made to the design and flow as we received more and better feedback from a larger and larger group of alpha testers.

Seriously — there was a lot of back and forth — in a good way.

When it was still a private experiment, School Finder went briefly by the code name “Chocolate”, for reasons which will (ok — might) make more sense if you read the commit messages (pictured, left).

I haven’t told my former teammate Lilith this (at the time, she was a digital analyst who proved invaluable in the development and testing phase), but it’s fantastic she took the trouble learning enough coding to singlehandedly save the project from that silly name.

On a more serious note, from a process perspective, the School Finder engagement was a win in terms of introducing modern tools like GitHub which allowed the department staff to carefully track issues (over 200 of them with 185 resolved, at last count) as well as collaborate remotely.

Back in February, Code for Australia answered a few quick questions from staff at the South Australia Department for Education and Child Development (DECD) regarding how possible it would be to get School Finder up and running in another state. We connected them with our colleagues from New South Wales to share their expertise and experience, and let them know we were just on the verge of publishing the open source project which they should be able to modify fairly easily.

After that, I actually heard very little for a few months. I started to wonder if they’d gone another route.

Then one day in November, I saw this happy news from Alvaro Maz, Code for Australia Co-founder and Managing Director:

A few months after open sourcing School Finder — BAM! it hits the ground running in South Australia

The coolest part?

School Finder welcome screen, in NSW

It looks totally different than the version we carefully tested and tweaked and designed and redesigned for New South Wales (pictured, left; compare with photo at top of story). That’s the beauty of releasing it as an open source project: what’s best as a standalone project in one state can be reimagined as more of an embedded widget in another state.

I connected with Richard Walsh of DECD and he answered a few questions about their development via email. He relayed that they “saw [School Finder] and realised that this was the solution that we were looking for”, that similar to NSW, South Australia is working to put more and more of their data online, and that the coding work to create their custom deployment of School Finder was relatively easy thanks to the modular code, comments, and development logging options.

Go try out the South Australia School Finder and let us know what you think. You can email us or leave a comment below.

Code for Australia is a Melbourne based national civic technology organisation that puts together the two biggest levers for improving people’s lives at scale: technology and government.

Code for Australia’s Fellowship program sends technologists, designers, and community organisers into government departments all across Oz to work on open source and open data projects.

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