[Ica-osgeo-labs] BOF in Portland: Some Ideas of certification

Wed Sep 24 08:45:47 PDT 2014

All,

I think there is a good case to be made for this coming under the “pay for items” from the OSGeo budget directly, at least partially.   Maintaining a skeletal set of teaching information and accreditation  packages should be coming under the OSGeo moniker in some form in order to give it a measure of validity, at least early on.  A couple of years down the road, this need can be re-examined, possible a separate organization could take on the responsibility.

Bobb

From: ica-osgeo-labs-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [mailto:ica-osgeo-labs-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Charles Schweik
Sent: Wednesday, September 24, 2014 10:38 AM
To: Philip James
Cc: ica-osgeo-labs at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: [Ica-osgeo-labs] BOF in Portland: Some Ideas of certification

Hi,

I just wanted to say that this sketching out of a suite of courses and accreditation is really important, and the GeoForAll community should try to work toward collective action toward a coordinated set of version 1 materials or possibly some kind of coordinated web-based classes that can be supported by participating institutions for credit -- building on what Phil Davis is already doing.

This sketch should be moved to an OSGeo wiki page if anyone has the time to do that...

We also need to, as a community, to continue to go for grant funding to support this. This continues to be on my agenda for 2014-15, but I hope others are trying too...

Cheers,
Charlie Schweik

On Wed, Sep 24, 2014 at 9:51 AM, Philip James <philip.james at newcastle.ac.uk<mailto:philip.james at newcastle.ac.uk>> wrote:
A really interesting idea.  From our perspective with a largely diverse Undergraduate intake who access jobs across the spectrum of the geospatial and surveying industries it would make sense to also consider a broader, perhaps less technical perspective towards certification  I was thinking along the lines of the European Computer Driving License (ECDL) for OSGEO products - demonstrating to potential employers an awareness and a certain level of competence in core open source geo technologies.   There would be potential here for institutions to substitute their own preferred OSGEO software (eg. QGIS or GVSIG) whilst maintaining the same level of accreditation.  For our current professional accreditation of our programmes we provide evidence periodically (every 3 or 5 years) to demonstrate that our courses are suitable to be accredited by external bodies.   Something along these lines with OSGEO would be an ideal scenario.

Phil

-----------------------------------------------------------
Phil James
Senior Lecturer in Geographical Information Science
School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences
Newcastle University
#geoanorak
https://github.com/geoanorak

Geospatial Engineering:           http://research.ncl.ac.uk/geospatial/
ICA-OSGEO Lab @ Newcastle:        http://research.ncl.ac.uk/osgeolab/
Geospatial Engineering Blog:      https://research.ncl.ac.uk/geospatial/blog/
Football tweet map:               http://ceg-sense.ncl.ac.uk/footballtweet
City Dashboard:                   http://ceg-research.ncl.ac.uk/uo/dashboard

-----Original Message-----
From: ica-osgeo-labs-bounces at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:ica-osgeo-labs-bounces at lists.osgeo.org> [mailto:ica-osgeo-labs-bounces at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:ica-osgeo-labs-bounces at lists.osgeo.org>] On Behalf Of Dr. Franz-Josef Behr
Sent: 24 September 2014 14:28
To: ica-osgeo-labs at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:ica-osgeo-labs at lists.osgeo.org>
Subject: [Ica-osgeo-labs] BOF in Portland: Some Ideas of certification

Dear colleagues,

during the BoF meeting in Portland we discussed the topic of FOSS4G certification and Arnulf shared some of his thoughts and insights (see also his talk/discussion [2] which I unfortunately missed, the slides at
[3].)

After the BoF meeting I had a further informal discussion with Philip Davis.

One idea:

***
The participating Universities (faculty members) could elaborate a set of prerequisites to award an FOSS4G certification and try to achieve an agreement amongst the academians as well with the OSGeo foundation.
***

The certificates could point out that they are acknowledged by the faculties/Unviersities who joined the Ica-osgeo-lab movement plus OSGeo.

The certificate could be granted by these Universities (for their respective students/for participants in courses9 and by other acknowledged institutions (i.e. MetaSpatial).

I found some keywords for Postgres certification [1], see below. Such keywords could be transfered easily to our aimed fields of certification.

Arnulf lists some types of certification [4]:

     Open Source Geospatial Software Developer
     Open Source Geospatial Software Professional
     Open Geospatial Standards Expert
     Open Geospatial Data Expert
     Open Geospatial Consultant

Further/other types could be:

     Certified OS GIS Technologist
     Certified QGIS/... developer
     Certified Web GIS solution architect
     Certified PostGIS Associate ...

We could start with one of them...!?

Regards

Franz-Josef
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Postgres Plus Associate Certification

     PostgreSQL System Architecture
     Installation
     Configuration
     Creating and Managing Databases
     Introduction to PSQL
     pgAdmin III
     Security basics
     SQL
     Backup and Recovery
     Point-in Time Recovery
     Routine Maintenance
     Postgres Data Dictionary
     Moving Data

Postgres Plus Professional Certification

     PostgreSQL System Architecture
     Transactions and Concurrency
     Performance Tuning
     Table Partitioning
     High Availability & Replication
     Connection Pooling
     Monitoring
     Procedural Languages
     Add on Utilities - Contrib

[1] http://www.daseq.de/schulungen/enterprisedb/edb-pgac/
[2] http://vimeo.com/106231984
[3] http://www.metaspatial.net/conferences/metaspatial-institute.html#/3
[4] http://www.metaspatial.net/conferences/metaspatial-institute.html#/8
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--
Charlie Schweik

Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Dept of Environmental Conservation and Center for Public Policy and Administration

Personal website: http://people.umass.edu/cschweik
Publications: http://works.bepress.com/charles_schweik/

Author, Internet Success: A Study of Open Source Software (MIT Press, 2012) - see http://tinyurl.com/d3e4545
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