Lately I’ve been doing some work with SIF data for a client. For those who don’t know (which seems to be just about everybody, including me up until earlier this year), SIF stands for School Interoperability Framework. It’s a new standard for exchanging educational data. You can learn the details here, or if you can’t sleep, here.
The idea behind SIF is timely and necessary. And the protocol is well designed. But the whole initiative is badly in need of a good PR consultant. In my opinion, SIF is the poster child for Standards Gone Wild. The technical lexicon surrounding a SIF implementation is denser than London fog. I’m aware that technical people often like the esoteric acronyms and terminology that we think separates us from mere mortals. But in this case, when you’re trying to convince a whole industry to change a fundamental practice, much of it may be counterproductive.
First off, the term “School Interoperability Framework” by itself is enough to intimidate many people. Upon hearing it, non-IT people run for the hills.
If anybody had asked me, I would’ve suggested a simpler, more descriptive name that could readily be turned into a catchy acronym. I think something like the Open Protocol for Education Networks (OPEN) or more simply, the School Data Standard (SDS) would have worked better from a marketing standpoint.
If you want the whole world to adopt your standard, then make it adoption-friendly.
Okay, I better get back to writing that non-normative RFC 4122 XML schema for our vertical zone integration server.
Cato's Life of the Mind is the personal site of Jamel Cato, a blogger and database developer who can usually be found between the pages of a good book when he's not laughing with his wife and kids. | 