Re: [tdf-discuss] TDF Certification

Hi all,

I believe that TDF should not do any kind of end-user certification. 

Instead, I am more in line with a certification ecosystem focused on
corporate and individual partners that provide value added services.


IANAL, but as I am reading trademark policy correctly nothing stops a
third-party to issue end-user certification targeting LibreOffice, using
both name and logo ("Certificate of qualification for LibreOffice").
 
These end users certificates issued by third-parties can be in line with
the national skills framework, ECDL or something else. While personally
do not think greatly of these skills frameworks, for the users they give
more value than something made at TDF.


For the certificates targeting VAS providers, I am not sure who will
take the responsibility of establishing a certain level of quality for
the certification training? In our fragile meritocracy, how to measure
who is qualified to give training and evaluate organizations in the name
of TDF through the certification process?


It may be a sound idea to remove TDF completely from the training and
leave this to third parties named in the draft document.

The motivation for the organizations and individuals to join this
certification process is clear. For a reasonable fee they get the
visibility including a measure of quality that may attract new business
opportunities.

If the training is provided by TDF, this can improve knowledge sharing,
growing motivation. On the other hand, given that we are a free software
project, help and resources are generally available in the community. 

We can not have documents, videos and welcome packages available only to
the certified individuals under proprietary license or expect that
volunteers will dedicate more time on the mailing lists answering
certified individuals. I am not sure how TDF can offer this kind of
services.


In the text, it looks like the development professional description got
mixed up. In my view, a development professional should be competent to
fix bugs and add new features to the LibreOffice core. The competence
can be measured with level of contributions to the source code. This is
close, but distinctive from the Integration professional where
extensions and ready made tools/scripts are used to integrate
LibreOffice with other software.


I share the comments from the wiki talk page and recommend that the
number of required certificated individuals should be proportional to
the number of employees in the organization to be recognized as
certificated organization. It may be good to recognize organization with
a single specialization, like just training or migration. I do not see
the need to specialize in 3 different areas.


Kind regards,
Goran Rakic


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