Shkolny Portal

» see portalschool.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

On 21 December 2007, at an event called School of the Future, the Russian minister of education and science Andrei Fursenko started up a project named Shkolny Portal, the single start page. The idea was that every school computer in the Russian Federation would open to it. The build was won in an open tender by an agency called Gruppa IMA and paid for out of the federal budget under state contract NP-13, lot number two, at a total of 13,950,000 rubles. At the exchange rate of the day that was more than half a million dollars.

What the money bought was a shell. A catalog of useful links, mail and blogs taken from mail.ru, a simple news feed, a forum running on a well-known off-the-shelf platform, a search engine adapted from one that already existed, and a help system. Oleg Braga, who ran the internet agency Ru-sait, told the press that a site like this was not worth fifty thousand dollars. The Russian blogosphere reached the same conclusion faster and with more jokes.

I was in university in Turkey when this launched, a computer engineering student on TTNet broadband, and the only thing about Shkolny Portal that needs no translation is the procurement. Every country has a version of the ministry that buys a national homepage. What makes this one worth a grave is that the public record of what went wrong is unusually complete, because Russian tech press in 2008 went at it with real appetite and the tender documents were online.

~ the case file ~

~ three days ~

Three days after the minister launched it, the portal was taken down for further work, with a promise to reopen by the second ten days of January 2008. It came back on 28 January, five weeks late by its own schedule. The most visible change was the user login system.

On 8 February 2008 an anonymous source inside the Federal Agency for Education told the press what had happened before launch: a technical failure, in which all of the site's source code was suddenly lost, which is why the developers had been forced to deploy the pilot build to production. CNews, reporting it, declined to take this seriously, and said the explanation pointed at either dishonesty or complete unprofessionalism on the part of everyone involved.

~ the filter ~

Search on Shkolny Portal ran through edu.gogo.ru, a filtered front end on the existing GoGo.Ru engine. The filter worked from a dictionary of banned query words and a pass over the results, and it leaked. Any Russian phrase with an innocent reading and a second one got through, so schoolchildren discovered that searching for a wet kitten or the naked truth returned exactly what you would expect. The filter stopped being a safety feature and became a game. Access to the mail.ru blogs bolted onto the portal was not filtered at all.

The instructive part is in the contract. State contract NP-13 contains the requirements for Shkolny Portal, and it does not ask for a content filter, nor does it define any way of measuring whether one works. When ROCIT, the Russian internet association, wrote an open letter asking IMA to implement a serious level of safety on a site aimed at schoolchildren, the answer was that these tasks had not been specified by the customer. That answer is correct, and that is the whole problem. Gazeta.ru wrote the launch up in January 2008 under a headline that puns the Russian word for portal into something considerably less suitable for schools.

~ what it cost ~

Shkolny Portal never really died, in the sense that nobody ever announced it. It simply stopped being maintained. Russian Wikipedia files it in the category of sites closed in 2009, and that is not what the record shows. The Internet Archive holds captures of the homepage running continuously through 2009 and 2010 and into 2011, serving the same Flash logo and the same menu of catalog, library, forums, blogosphere, mail and polls. The last capture is dated 1 February 2011. After that there is nothing at all until 2022, when the domain turned up in somebody else's hands.

So the honest death date is early 2011, when a server bill stopped being paid on a project that had been abandoned years before. Half a million dollars of national education budget bought a link directory that sat unattended for three years and then vanished without a notice, and the only reason anyone can date it at all is that a web crawler kept checking.

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