Colabula is an open platform

Many educational technology companies have created products that seemed promising at first but eventually disappeared, leaving schools and students without the tools they depended on.

Consider Pond - a shared education resources platform run by Network for Learning (N4L) that was once hugely popular with teachers in New Zealand, but was suddenly closed in 2019. Similarly, VisArtsNet, a very popular mailing list run by the Ministry of Education via the TKI Mailing List was recently shutdown, effectively deleting all content and conversations that had been shared there. Besides Facebook groups, there are no other alternatives for teachers to use to share resources with each other.

While platforms such as Facebook and Instagram are convenient, free and easy to use, their privacy policies and terms of service means that any content submitted to these platforms is granted use by Meta for AI training, 3rd party advertising, and can be used for any purpose. This is not acceptable for a platform that is used to share educational resources.

Open-source software like Colabula, which uses the AGPL 3.0 license, helps solve this problem by making its code freely available to everyone. Since the code is open for anyone to study, people can find and fix security problems quickly, and schools can trust that their data is being handled properly. Should Colabula in its current form ever shutdown, anyone has fork the code and host their own instance.

Schools can also modify Colabula to work exactly the way they need it to, instead of having to follow what a company like Meta decides is best.

By sharing our code openly, we intend to help others who want to create better educational software, leading to more innovation and greater outcomes for everyone.

For the content and conversations published, we adhere to the "Colabula Promise" - we will provide full Postgres and storage exports to any parties wishing to host their own instance should Colabula ever fold.

Colabula isn't just making software – we're building a group of people who care about making education better for everyone.