[Qgis-psc] Notes about certification

Wed Sep 12 05:59:27 PDT 2018

Hi

> On 12 Sep 2018, at 12:10, Alexandre Neto <senhor.neto at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> Here’s the take of the Portuguese User Group on this matter. (Disclaimer, we support Nyall and Richard's opinion).
> 
> We have been talking (for the last year or more) about what we should consider to be an active contributing company. The outcome of the discussion is something like this:
> 
> - Does the company is at least bronze sponsor, or the amount spent in donations and public crowdfundings sums 500€?
> - Does the company actively contributed with code to QGIS Core (how many commits?)
> - Does the company actively contributed with useful plugins to QGIS official Repo (how many new plugins?)
> - Does the company actively worked on documentation (how many commits?)
> 
> Now, after your discussion we could also add:
> - Does the company publicly provides their original (and updated) training materials freely under a open license?
> 
> We left the translation work out intentionally, as currently there is no way to measure a translator work.
> 
> In our opinion, a company only needs to achieve one of the above topics ANNUALLY to be considered a QGIS friendly or QGIS supporter company. This should be reviewed every year, to make sure the company keeps helping the project year after year.
> 
> For us, a company has always the option to support the project financially, in case they can’t or don’t want to contribute with work (time).
> 
> We still have some doubts about the metrics for each topic. We have also concerns about companie's scale: how a small one man show company is compared with one with tens of people (What if the company has more than X employees then two topics should be required?).

I’m really a little surprised by this thread because in the past when some of us have advocated using e.g. GitHub for tracking issues rather than Redmine, a lot of people shout the idea down saying ‘FOSS or death!’ :-) Now we seem to have a different standard for training materials than for everything else. The desire for open training materials from QGIS Certifying organisations was less a question of ‘what is your contribution?’ (We ask that separately) and more a question of ‘if you want to certify QGIS users will you also be transparent about what and how you train your users’. We never had intention of requiring translations (as Yves raised) or mandating that the materials are managed by QGIS.org <http://qgis.org/> (though it would be nice to have a central pool of training exercises as Richard advocates) in a git repo.

That aside, since this seems to be a somewhat decisive issue, the lesser solution would be simply that the materials are made available to Kurt for review and he can use his judgement from there as to whether they provide an adequate course. Lets not get too stuck on these things…we first raised certification plans in Wroclaw hackfest in 2010 and I would like to just keep moving forward and not get paralysed by the details….lets just adjust them to something that most people are comfortable with and move on….

I will add a last thought: I get regular messages from people who use the training materials we wrote thanking me and tell me how they are using it to train people in some far flung place. If your plan (like mine) for QGIS is social upliftment by allowing people to better understand and manage the world around them, sharing our training materials is surely a huge component in realising this vision.

Regards

Tim

> 
> Still, we are willing to set some numbers and see how it works.
> 
> For the Portuguese QGIS users,
> 
> Alexandre Neto
> 
> Jürgen E. Fischer <jef at norbit.de <mailto:jef at norbit.de>> escreveu no dia terça, 11/09/2018 às 17:17:
> Hi Tim,
> 
> On Tue, 11. Sep 2018 at 18:04:39 +0200, Tim Sutton wrote:
> > which seemed to get lost
> 
> No, it[0] didn't get lost.
> 
> 
> Jürgen
> 
> [0] https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-psc/2018-September/006527.html <https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-psc/2018-September/006527.html>
> 
> --
> Jürgen E. Fischer           norBIT GmbH             Tel. +49-4931-918175-31
> Dipl.-Inf. (FH)             Rheinstraße 13          Fax. +49-4931-918175-50
> Software Engineer           D-26506 Norden             http://www.norbit.de <http://www.norbit.de/>
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> Alexandre Neto
> ---------------------
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—

Tim Sutton

Co-founder: Kartoza
Ex Project chair: QGIS.org

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