I wrote as:

Is this the right approach ? Perhaps not. This approach or offering is based on what the developer world makes of the requirements and the processes of the academic world. And in a way that could turn out to be dangerously skewed. Till date, at least for India, the developers have not really sat across with the academicians and educators to question them directly on what they want the software to do, how they want it to behave. I guess the time has come for us to do that. Just imagining (or assuming) the requirements and then trying to figure out the best possible pieces of the puzzle that will complete the jigsaw will only see FLOSS lose credibility.

A friend called up to ask if after all these years I was advocating a Top Down model. I would like to clarify that. Yes I am advocating the Top-Down model. When designing and engineering for the education segment, the Bottom-Up model is too sketchy in terms of information flow to come up with something that is worth delivering.

Case Study: A higher secondary school does not have a well defined IS process flow. The board wants to streamline the operations by adopting FLOSS and thus getting ‘value-for-money’. The school functions over 3 distributed premises with no interconnectivity.

Design the solution for the school using both the models and figure out for yourself.