Re: Certification and SRA

Robert Bernier wrote:
<snip>

>The second fact that I want to bring up concerns PostgreSQL certification itself. The challenge we face is that at
thistime there is no community derived certification for PostgreSQL. But.... in my opinion (I'm not speaking for the
companynow folks) 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? 
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How many people are interested in participating?  How do we get people
to participate?  I would be interested in doing what I can.

I would suggest that if we do this well, we can (as a spinnoff) create
enough beginner-level material to make PostgreSQL the de-facto database
for learning RDBMS concepts and that would help promote PostgreSQL
beyond the benefits of certifications.

My own suggestion is creating something in the following ways:

1)  Create an outline of what we feel is necessary to test and maybe
what weight the subjects should have on the certification process.
2)  Let participating firms create exams based on #1.
3)  Create an official community and peer-reviewed curriculum teaching
these topics.
4)  Create an official body to certify that the exams covered in step #2
meet community requirements.

In my view the community cannot create certification exams of most
levels (advanced certifications might be possible though) due to the
issue of secrecy of the questions.  Instead, I would suggest "certifying
the certifiers."  This allows nearly all of the documentation created by
the group to be open for review.  It would also separate the
certification from the standard which might allow for better
certifications....

The secret to success will be to have several dedicated people involved,
and have a chair who has strong coordination skills (who can keep the
group on-target).

>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.  
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>Many of you BSD people know the BSD certification debates. Much of what's been discussed here, are exactly the same
issuesdiscussed there. 
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>The point I want to make is  .... this group is suceeding .....
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>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.
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Will bsdcertification.org actually prepare their own certification
exams?  Or will they have other companies do it?

>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. 
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>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. 
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>Comments?
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Since you have been involved in the bsdcertification.org group, how
would you see us going forward?

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
Metatron Technology Consulting