wrong cloud
"The blood, sweat and tears that has gone into the Ultranet and the work teachers put in – it's soul destroying. I have to face parents who took me on face value when I said: 'This is the best thing since sliced bread – every school is going to be using it in the future."

Those are the words of a school principal at Alkira Secondary College in Victoria, Australia. His school is receiving a real-life lesson in the the risks of cloud computing.

Ultranet, the state-wide private cloud project for schools is at risk of being cancelled in 10 days due to budget cuts. It is not clear whether the vendor, NEC, is obliged to release data back to the users if the original four year contract is not extended.

Commercial, confidential discussions

It appears that the possibility of ending the contract was not supposed to be public knowledge. If the finance department had kept their intentions secret then it is possible that users would not even have had the opportunity to try and manually extract some of their data, as they are rushing to do now.

Instead of getting on with the business of education itself, teachers and students are having to waste time trying to individually download student projects, photos, feedback and other meta data from the system in an ad-hoc manner.

An opportunity for free and open source software

This debacle may well be a huge opportunity for the free and open source software community to remind people that the value of retaining control over user data can not be forgotten when evaluating outsourced, private cloud solutions that claim to be "free" or offer low costs to get started.

There were apparently 18 schools who initially trialed the program and many more have gradually joined up. This would be the perfect opportunity for advocates of genuinely free software solutions to contact them and let them know they are not alone and that many of us have anticipated these problems for years. While central government administrators tend to be hooked on the idea of administering big contracts with `trusted' vendors, these local school administrators and the communities around them are probably more receptive to the free software message than at any other time.

List of schools using Ultranet

Many of the schools using Ultranet can be found with Google, as it appears to be integrated in their web sites. Click here for a Google search that finds many of the schools and related technical pages, support documents and other material

A message to schools everywhere

For schools facing this crisis or considering adopting such services in other countries, I would share this very simple advice: if you are offered a solution that doesn't give you complete control to conveniently extract all of your data in bulk whenever you want and use it in your own software on any computer, then it is not a good foundation to build on.

The free software community has been actively working to provide truly free solutions for schools and I would strongly encourage schools to look at projects like Skolelinux/Debian-Edu and k12Linux that have been built by educators who also have a deep understanding of software and data freedom issues.