[Qgis-psc] QGIS Certification

[Vincent Picavet]

Hello, 

Le jeudi 26 juin 2014 23:51:17, Tim Sutton a écrit :

[..snip building a platform for certification exams..]

> The idea so far has been that Arnulf / Metaspatial will act as the
> certification body offering a number of different certification tracks and
> ensuring consistency and QA througout all testable topics. They would also
> do the financial side and push a cut from every exam back to the relevant
> projects, maintain the needed infrastructure etc.
> 
> I would like to stress that these are just talks and so far we have just
> been trying to come up with a workable system with the aim of bringing it
> back to the PSC / community for comment and then going off to build a
> prototype that others can pay with.

I am quite puzzled by this.

For me the certification authority should be a non-profit organization. You 
cannot be a certification authority, running a certification platform AND 
providing training and consultancy for profit. This looks like a big confusion 
of roles.
Certification should be a unification of training assessment. You cannot unify 
any other trainer if you are both trainer and exam provider ? There is a bias 
here.

There should be a clear separation of roles like :
* The Certification Authority would be an independant, non-profit organization 
in charge of creating the exams, and centralize all attributed certifications. 
It could run a platform, or pay one or various private companies to operate 
the platform.
The CA could be a branch of OSGeo, but this has been discussed already ?

* Trainers and training companies would provide classes, and their trainees 
could pass the official certification after this with the CA.

If the CA is a trainer and for-profit, this is closed competition, and there is 
a strong risk of having the "metaspatial certification" and the "betaspatial 
certification" soon, and you have a balkanization of certifications, which leads 
to the point you started from. Seems contrary to any open innovation, equal 
chances and opensource values ?

Another model would be a CA certifying trainers, which in turn have the 
ability to deliver certifications.
But the top of the certification pyramid should definitly be independant, 
objective, not for profit and have open governance.

Note that non-profit does not mean not having any money flowing in, on the 
contrary, it should get money for any certification delivered, employ people to 
manage this, give money back to projects, pay another company to operate a 
platform if needed. In an open and independant way.

Vincent


> In practical terms for the person making the enquiry to you, we at this
> stage have only the training manual (the idea being that we would match and
> extend the training manual and the certification tests to correspond to
> each other), while the certification platform is being planned for
> hopefully the near future. If others are interested and have concrete ideas
> of how things should work it would be great to form a little team and join
> Arnulf and myself in actually building this. Naturally the testing platform
> would be all open source but for obvious reasons the content would not be
> and we would use funding from the exams to also help in development of the
> examination content.

> 
> Regards
> 
> Tim
> 
> > Sorry if I have been out of touch...
> > 
> > -gary
> > 
> > --
> > =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
> > Gary Sherman
> > 
> > Founder, QGIS Project
> > Consulting: geoapt.com
> > Publishing: locatepress.com
> > 
> > We work virtually anywhere
> > =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
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