• What is the Schools Interoperability Framework Association (SIF Association )?
  
  
• Who is involved in the SIF Association initiative?
  
  
• How will a school benefit from the SIF Association?
  
  
• What is a SIF Association Partner?
  
  
• How does my organization become a SIF Association Partner?
  
  
• On what language is the specification based?
  
  
• Will this become a product that is sold in the future?
  
  
• Are there products that are developed based on the SIF specification?
  
  
• How do education technology decision-makers know which products are developed according to the SIF specification?
  
  
• There have been many consortia, initiatives, and collaborations formed in education and industry to address technical issues and interoperability standards (e.g., SPEEDE/ExPRESS). Why are you working on yet another one?
  
  
• Will SIF be a worldwide specification?
  
  

The Schools Interoperability Framework Association is a non-profit organization that brings together vendors, government agencies, state departments of education, and other industry leaders to develop a specification ensuring that pK12 instructional and administrative software applications can share information seamlessly. SIFA is not a product but rather an industry-supported technical blueprint that will enable diverse applications to interact and share data.

The SIF Association membership is comprised of educational technology vendors, schools, state departments of education, the US Department of Education, various education associations and other agencies. Please look at our list of members to see who is involved.

The goal of the SIF Association is to help educators maximize their instructional and administrative software investments and make more efficient use of staff and faculty time. Educators constantly lament that their financial management, administration, library, transportation routing, and cafeteria applications do not work together. SIF solves these problems. By using SIF Certified applications, schools can dramatically reduce redundant data entry and spent more time on teaching.

• Name and contact information

• Type of organization

• Goals and Mission

• Current members

• Reason for becoming a SIF Association Partner Member

This information will be presented to the SIF Association Board of Directors for consideration.  A non-monetary reciprocal membership arrangement is required and all Partner Members must sign the SIF Association Partnership agreement. 

No. The Schools Interoperability Framework Association is not a product and will not be sold. It is an industry initiative to develop a set of technical specifications for ensuring that pK-12 instructional and administrative software applications work seamlessly together.

We are responding to the needs of the educators who continue to grapple with interoperability issues. They are telling us that they need greater flexibility from their instructional and administrative software applications. For example, they need to produce reports using data from multiple applications and deliver those reports over the Internet securely. Those are the kinds of issues that the Schools Interoperability Framework Association addresses. Whenever possible, we will use the SPEEDE/EXPRESS specifications without reinventing definitions of common attributes like codes for gender, ethnicity, and grades.

Yes. We are currently working on a number of international projects in locations such as Australia, UK, Canada and Europe.  While the focus of the initiative is supporting and empowering pK-12 schools in the United States, bringing other countries to the table during specification development can benefit data modeling, enhance vendor opportunities internationally and extend the usage of SIFA.