Certification and SRA

Guys,

As somebody who works for SRA America there's two things I'd like to share with you that I hope will add to the
discussionin regards to PostgreSQL testing and certification. 

First off; SRA Japan and SRA America, are two distinct business units in the same corporation who have different
objectives.SRA Japan has been running  PostgreSQL courses on its home turf (Japan) for the last couple of years now.
However,the most recent developments that I've been part of has to do with the New York branch where we've recently
portedthe Japanese courseware to English. SRA America is now running PostgreSQL courses for the North American market. 

The second fact that I want to bring up concerns PostgreSQL certification itself. The challenge we face is that at this
timethere is no community derived certification for PostgreSQL. But.... in my opinion (I'm not speaking for the company
nowfolks) certification is valid and worthwhile when the standards it follows has been developed on a
community/consensualbasis. So do how we develop a standard that will be of high quality and accepted by the community? 

It so happens that I'm fairly close to another community project, several SRA America people are involved in, called
theBSD Certification Group, http://bsdcertification.org. They are successfully developing a world-wide certification
standardsfor all the BSD variants.  

Many of you BSD people know the BSD certification debates. Much of what's been discussed here, are exactly the same
issuesdiscussed there. 

The point I want to make is  .... this group is suceeding .....

The secret to their success is the "process" and excellent "documentation". There are ten people in the group. They
coordinate the debates and policy implementation. They issued an online survey that got people to say what they thought
wasimportant in a BSD standards. This is no small survey; it takes two hours to fill out and they had the survey
translatedinto a number of languages. In the first two weeks they had recieved over 2,000 completed surveys. They've
recentlyissued their Task Analysis Survey Report,http://bsdcertification.org/downloads/sr1_links.pdf, and it's a
whopping144 pages long. And just yesterday they published their Certification Roadmap,
http://bsdcertification.org/downloads/BSDCertificationRoadmap.pdf.

The group finds itself getting support from all over the world. In the past seven months the group's chair has been
invitedto speak at conferences in North America, Europe, South America (even a group in India wants to bring her over)
aboutwhat they are doing. 

It is the BSD Certification Group's intention of documenting a how-to of what it will take for an opensource community
tocreate a standards body similar to what they've done. 

Comments?


Robert Bernier