Boston City Councilors ordered up a hearing today at which to press Boston school officials to explain how the new BPS Zum (pronounced "zoom," but for obvious reasons not spelled that way) app that was supposed to make BPS buses run as softly as a cloud instead led to some buses not showing up in the morning for an hour or more - and some kids riding buses home for up to three hours as their poor, befuddled drivers tried to navigate Boston's dropped-bowl-of-spaghetti roads. Read more.
This reminds me of when Stockholm launched the school platform system, a system that would ease and centralize access to school resources, but after spending a billion SEK it was shit, so a group of parents took the matter into their own hands and built a new app that interacted with the API calls of the system, the new app was great, so the city called the police on the parent group, but the police investigation showed that the parents app only used the information the city had published themselves, nothing illegal had taken place.
Then the city changed gears and worked with the group of parents.
Here is a summary:
https://linustechtips.com/topic/1387097-their-school-app-didnt-work-so-they-built-an-open-source-alternative-then-the-schools-called-the-cops/