Ask HN: What tool to use for storing information about educational facilities?
Hi HN,
I'm co-founder of Polish startup [1] focused on helping high school graduates to choose their future university and currently one of our problems is place of storing information about universities (and other edu facilities) that are in some step of our business pipeline. We work in a team of 3 people, and we are all "it-guys". We started in 2018 with GitLab issues, later migrated to JetBrains YouTrack, but it's not enough.
Our business process repeats every year and consists of following steps:
1. We collect information about last year's requirements that needed to be fulfilled to get into university - part of information is public, part of it is accessible only after making contact with university 2. We collect information about this year's requirements, at this step we collect public information about requirements which we need to code in python (these are formulas of calculating scoring points) 3. We enter collected data about each university into our database (data from step 1) 4. We code formulas from step 2 in python
Each university can be in different step of this process, also sometimes we decide to add new information like url to specific subpage of university website, or we need to add some notes about university like date of last contact, date of deadline of their response (specific for Polish law)
So every year we have to repeat this process, but also we need to have access to last year's data, not everything is entered to production database.
Problems that we have with GitLab issues and now with YouTrack are:
1. We need to add new field on project level whenever we need to add new information about university (not a big deal, but annoying) 2. Point 1. caused case, when we sometimes add information in comment or issue description, which later is hard to find 3. Each university state is being changed every year, ex. last year we set it to "done, all data entered", this year we need to change it to "to do" 4. Every year we need to overwrite last year's data and that's not really helpful when we want to compare ex. response time 5. We need to handle with ~150 universities every year, and we are going to handle high schools too, which is extra ~3500 facilities
I'm looking for some tool that will allow us to store all the information per year and keep our "main information" like webpage, name, contact etc.
If you see any other problems with our process, please let me know, we are open to any suggestions.
[1] https://dostanesie.pl/
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