[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
http://business.newsforge.com/business/05/09/13/1816200.shtml?tid=35
This is something the Group has considered for the "professional" (more advanced)
certification and ties in a little bit to the recent discussion on pre-requisites (though that
discussion was for the "associate" or less advanced exam).
What does this list think of requiring the "professional" candidate to do more
than just pass an exam?
Worthless. Actually, less than worthless since it will cost real
resources to implement.
I don't agree with the premise of the article; it comes across as whiny
to me. Mentoring programs already exist, both in Linux and in FreeBSD.
No, they're not formal and no, they're not touchy-feely (as most
mentoring is done by email and IM), but they are very useful. I'm on
more than a dozen mailing lists where mentoring happens; some are
geographical (my local user group), some are specific to the software I
use, some are hardware related (ie, a "Linux-on-Thinkpad list") and
others are special-interest related (ie, "open source advocacy in
Africa"). In these lists, I've been both mentor and protogé, as I'm sure
most people here have been.
The point is, that volunteer mentoring is nice but trying to shoehorn it
into a formal structure threatens to hurt as much as it helps. The
status quo allows and encourages most people to find fora where any
question is welcomed, and indeed most questions have been asked before
and usually have canned but helpful answers at the ready (ie, the
appropriate FAQ file).
The problem is that, as FOSS is moves into the mainstream, it's being
looked at by people who have come to expect their hands held.
Furthermore, because they've heard that this is such a community of
sharing, they should be able to get all the help they need without
needing to pay for it.
Indeed, there is an active community ready to help, but coming to this
community implies ground rules which require the asker's willingness to
do a little basic research before going to the mentors. (Hence the
frequently-terse replies of "RTFM", often delivered by highly-skilled
mentors, to those who deny the ground rules.)
If you want someone ready to hold your hand, at times of your choosing,
without doing any pre-research, there are plenty of people who will
gladly do that for pay. Indeed, since people would rather be mentoring
rather than bureaucratizing other mentors, such an operation would
probably cost money to implement. Who would fund it? Would the money
really be put to good use (that is, better use than if it were spent
hiring professional editors to clean up FAQs?)
The suggestion that a certification -- any certification -- demand such
mentoring experience as a pre-req is just absurd. The cost to verify and
enforce the requirements would be very expensive since -- unlike
numerically-scored tests -- verification would have to be done by human
rather than machine. Who will pay for this policing mechanism? How does
someone _prove_ involvement? What if someone is a longtime mentor who
gives out bad advice?
Of course it is nice to have a cadre of skilled people who are not only
knowledgeable but willing to share that knowledge. But it is not, and
cannot be, the role of a skills certification program to require that
someone can (or wants to) mentor.
I urge this group to stay focused on what is being certified.
Successfully crawl before walking before running. Do not "load up" the
cert with demands for qualities that would be nice for people to have
but are not _required_ for someone to do their job. As we've seen, even
an ethics declaration is proving to be touchy...
- Evan
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