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

[Alex Mandel]

Without the "Open" part these already exist and we don't want to compete
with:
GISP  http://www.gisci.org/
Master of GIS Science

The issue from the community has been that neither of these indicate a
person has any experience with more than a single software, or that any
of that software is OpenSource by an opensource.org approved license.

So yes one way to go would be a Certificate in OGC standards. Another is
to push/recommend that other orgs require demonstrated competency in
more than 1 GIS technology.

Now from the software industry side, there are certifications is just
about everything, down to specific software.
MS Exchange Cert
Oracle Cert
Postgres Cert

So I see a few ways forward, 1. a general FOSS4G cert or 2. Specific
subproject certs, or 3. If you do enough project specific certs you
become FOSS4G certified.

The role of OSGeo playing the standards body that issues the
certificates or accredits institutions to do so.


Questions to think about:
What about an OSS cert is different from just any old cert on a
particular software?


Thanks,
Alex


On 09/24/2014 08:50 AM, Strobl Josef wrote:
> Interesting discussion, and I am glad to see it popping up again - a good indicator that it might not just turn into a fluke ...
> 
> My view is that a certification with 'open' as a defining criterion is hard to argue and justify - the only area where I could see this to work is in open specs like in OGC. Overall, individuals might be certified in software-specific competences (of course these can be FOSS), or in generic geospatial skills, knowledge and competences (this already is being done, though). Thus individual products, technologies and architectures, or workflows (implementation of services-based workflows, integrated portals etc) could be suitable targets for certification, but not so much their 'open' characteristics per se ...
> 
> Avoiding 'open' as _the_ defining characteristic also would help navigating a terrain with sometimes fuzzy boundaries. 
> 
> .josef
> 
> Prof. Dr. Josef Strobl | Josef.Strobl at sbg.ac.at 
> University of Salzburg | Department of Geoinformatics - Z_GIS
> Phone: +43 (0)662 8044 7503 | http://jstrobl.zgis.net 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: ica-osgeo-labs-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [mailto:ica-osgeo-labs-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] Im Auftrag von Dr. Franz-Josef Behr
> Gesendet: Mittwoch, 24. September 2014 15:28
> An: ica-osgeo-labs at lists.osgeo.org
> Betreff: [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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-- 
Alex Mandel

Geography Graduate Group
University of California, Davis
http://geography.ucdavis.edu