FOSS certification
Kenneth Gonsalves
we are happy to announce that Anna University has approved our proposed FOSS
certification and we will be conducting the first exam some time in June. Being
FOSS, the certification is not a rigid one and will hopefully evolve - to get
the discussion rolling here is a comment from Nirav Mehta of
Magnettechnologies - Nirav is a long time contributor, user and even financier
of FOSS.
<quote>
Hi Kenneth,
Nice to see you and NRC-FOSS take up this initiative. We started working
on a project called OpenCerti, but never launched it out for public. Our
intention there was to create a community driven testing / certification
system.
I like your ideas of Foss Web Deployment Engineer. I would be eager to
hire a candidate with such skills! At the same time, I feel most of
today's programmers will fail the test. They do not know much about
version control and will find it difficult to setup servers.
Depending on how you want to brand this / promote this, you may need to
revise the outline. If you are focusing more on "development" and not
just "deployment", you would have to probably give more focus on
building a nice application, code quality, test cases etc.
If you can somehow also include communication and requirement gathering,
it will be great. In my experience most people fail there, and that
skill is more important than ability to apt-get trac!
I also think a score will be helpful. Did you have specific reasons to
limit it to pass/fail?
Also, this test will not be scalable because of its design. Do you want
to have it grow fast? Then you will need to make it easy to carry out.
You may also think about having "certification camps" in different
cities, where you tie up with institution, and test / certify a few
dozen people in a day. This way, you are not limited only to Chennai.
Hope these inputs are useful. Do let me know if you need anything more!
</quote>
--
regards
kg
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