We began the project by building out the foundation and plumbing. All participating districts share the costs associated with this foundation, and all districts benefit from it. 

The foundation includes the operational data store aligned to the Ed-Fi data standard, hosting, an analytics layer for speedy reporting, Google-integrated security and single sign-on, application programming interfaces that allow data to be transferred securely, data import utilities, and data visualization tools.

The foundation is not sexy, but having it in place makes it possible to rapidly develop features and functions that serve educators and students and be able to offer them at scale, processing large amounts of data on behalf of dozens, and hopefully eventually, hundreds of districts. Because the foundation components have “minimum fees” required for maintenance, we are able to minimize the impact of these fees on overall project costs by spreading those costs out across all members.