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Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2012 15:04:36 +0100
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Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: After AOO 3.4, attracting new contributors
From: Ian Lynch <ianrlynch@gmail.com>
To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org
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On 29 March 2012 14:08, Shane Curcuru <asf@shanecurcuru.org> wrote:

> Thanks Pedro for explaining the non-profit angle.  The ASF does not offer
> any such certificates currently - it's hard to see how they work with our
> primary mission (of the ASF overall), which is providing software for the
> public good.
>
> There are plenty of other third parties who do this kind of thing, both in
> terms of training,


Training and certification should really be separated otherwise there is a
potential conflict of interests.


> and in terms of education and the real world. Presuming those third
> parties respect our brand and trademarks, that model works out better for
> everyone, since they can focus on the training and ensuring the
> certifications are meaningful and fairly awarded.
>

One issue that is real is judging demand. Probably if there are < 1000
potential people to certificate most professional awarding organisations
are unlikely to consider it viable. That is why probably end-user
certification in skills associated with using AOO is more likely than
professional certification of coders, unless the coders themselves did it
through mentoring and peer review. Another option would be to partner with
a computer science faculty or faculties in a university to make the
"industry link" with academia. That goes on quite a lot with proprietary
software vendors but I know of few FOSS examples.

One model that Apache (and many projects) do participate in is Google's
> Summer of Code, so that might be a place to look for project ideas or just
> ask for help, either from the GSoC folks or from the various Apache
> projects (including this podling, right?) participating:
>
>  http://community.apache.org/**gsoc.html<http://community.apache.org/gsoc.html>
>
> - Shane


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Ian

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