Christian Landgren's patience was getting shorter. The separated father of three wasted precious time trying get the City of Stockholm's official school system, Skolplattform to work correctly every day. Landgren would go through endless menus trying to figure out the school activities of his children. It was difficult enough to find out what his children needed in the gym kit, but it was much more complicated to figure out how to report them sick. The Skolplattform was a constant problem for thousands of parents in Stockholm two years after it was launched in August 2018. Landgren says that parents and users were both angry.
This was not the intention of Skolplattform. The Skolplattform was created in 2013 to ease the lives of around 500,000 children, parents, and teachers in Stockholm. It acts as the technical backbone of all things education, from the registration of attendance to the keeping of records of grades. It is composed of three parts and 18 modules. Five external companies maintain the platform. 600 preschools and schools use the system, which has separate logins for each teacher, student and parent. Problem is? It doesn't work.
Skolplattform has not achieved its original ambitions. It has cost over 1 billion Swedish Krona (SEK) ($117 million). Teachers and parents have expressed concern about the system's complexity. There have been reports of project mismanagement and delays. It has been called an IT disaster. On average, the Android app gets 1.2 stars.
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On October 23, 2020, Landgren, a developer and the CEO of Swedish innovation consulting firm Iteam, tweeted a hat design emblazoned with the words Skrota Skolplattformenloosely translated as trash the school platform. He joked he should wear the hat when he picks his children up from school. He decided to make his own decisions a few weeks later while wearing the same hat. Landgren says that it was out of frustration that he created his own app.
He wrote to the city asking for access to the Skolplattforms API documents. He logged in to his account while awaiting a reply and attempted to figure out if the system could possibly be reverse-engineered. He had created something that worked in just a few hours. He said that I could see information from the school platform on my screen. Then I began to build an API from scratch on top of their poor API.
The work began at the end of November 2020. This was just days after the 4 million SEK GDPR penalty was imposed on Stockholms Board of Education for serious deficiencies in the Skolplattform. Integritetsskyddsmyndigheten, Swedens data regulator, had found serious flaws in the platform that had exposed the data of hundreds of thousands of parents, children, and teachers. Google searches could have led to the access of personal information in some cases. (The flaws were corrected and the fine was reduced upon appeal.
Landgren joined forces with Johan brink, a parent, and Erik Hellman to create a plan. The trio would release an open-source version of the Skolplattform as an app for parents in Stockholm. The team used Landgren's previous work to open Chromes developer tools and log into the Skolplattform. They then wrote down all URLs and payloads. The code called the platform's private API. They then built packages to run on phones, essentially adding a layer to the already glitchy Skolplattform.
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The result was the ppna Skolplattformen (or Open School Platform). The app was published on February 12, 2021. All code is available under an open-source license on GitHub. The code is open to anyone, and there are very few restrictions on what they can do. The city could use any part of the code if it wanted. However, rather than welcoming it with open arms city officials responded with anger. The City of Stockholm had warned Landgren before the app was even released that it could be illegal.
The open-source app was hampered by Stockholms Stad (or the City of Stockholm) for eight months. The app was allegedly illegally accessing personal data and it warned parents not to use it. Landgren claims that officials reported the app to the data protection authorities. They also tweaked the underlying code of the official system to stop it from operating.
In April, the city declared that it would be involving the police. Officials said the app's cofounders could have been responsible for a criminal data breach. They asked cybercrime investigators who would investigate how the app operated. Landgren, who was meeting with officials from the city to discuss concerns about the app's functionality, was taken by surprise. He said it was very scary because of the police involvement.
