NomosDB is a database for any institution working in the education sector. It arose from practical difficulties in my work as a Lecturer in the Law Department at Canterbury Christ Church University, but its ultimate aim is to be usable (and used) by Universities, FE colleges, schools and other educational institutions
This project has been started by a lecturer in law, who also happens to be an open source enthusiast and a hobby programmer (more here). In my day job I realised that almost every university seems to rely on horribly complicated proprietary database systems that were not designed with the teacher in mind. This results in most of the data management being done by the teachers themselves on their own computers - in the form of the worst menace to humankind: spreadsheets.
Almost every teacher knows the problem of having a folder on their computer (or, even more often, on their Desktop) with a variety of spreadsheets in it that are difficult to distinguish: accounting101-marks.xls, accounting101-marks-final.xls, accounting101-marks-latest.xls accounting101-marks-corrected-version.xls and so on. Depending on the institution, this can go on like this for attendance, tutorial notes and so on.
This is were NomosDB comes in: the NO MOre Spreadsheets DataBase. Instead of having a variety of unconnected spreadsheets on each teachers computer and an illegible and unusable commercial University database solution programmed in 1986 by people that hate their lives, NomosDB helps to have an easy to use database structure that helps teachers and admin staff to focus on their real jobs.
The aim of this system is to have an easy to use database application that relies on open standards and makes it very easy to get the data out in machine readable formats should the user want to switch after all. Currently, almost everything is exportable in pretty PDF files, but soon it should be easy to get your data in csv and json files as well, so that even a typical, non-technical teacher can save a backup they can open with Microsoft Excel or similar soul-destroying applications.
This application is not trying to be a huge Virtual Learning Environment that allows you to post slides, videos, upload assessments or let the students create Wikis. Instead, it is supposed to stay focused on its main goal - to make the teacher's life easier by automating repetetive tasks, offering a quick way to access records for modules and students and a simple solution to share assessment feedback and marks with the students.
Contrary to its predecessor, MySDS, NomosDB is supposed to be heavily based on Test Driven Development. Contributions to the projects should therefore have reliable and understandable tests to make sure that the data is safe. In production use, NomosDB is supposed to deal with highly sensitive information, so it is important that data integrity and security is at the heart of any addition, no matter how cool the proposed new feature is... In my testing structure, I am relying heavily on Harry Percival's book Test Driven Development with Python. If you have no experience with test driven development and would like to contribute, I strongly recommend to have a look.