Hi Paul > On 9. Mar 2018, at 09:22, Paul Brown <paul.br...@kde.org> wrote: > > On jueves, 8 de marzo de 2018 21:40:00 (CET) Thomas Pfeiffer wrote: >> Dear KDE community, >> With the $200k donation from the Pineapple Fund [1], we have some money >> available which we can invest in KDE’s future. We are currently thinking >> about what to best invest in, and one of the ideas was to pay for >> professional training in some skills for contributors. For that, we’d like >> to know which skills would be most useful for us to have in order to take >> KDE further? >> >> This can be soft or hard skills, but it would probably make sense to train >> things which we don’t already learn naturally from our collaboration >> anyway. >> >> So, what do you think? >> >> Thank you in advance for your input, >> Thomas > > Hello Thomas, > > Would these courses have to be distance, online learning? Or could they be > intensive, on-site courses organised at KDE gatherings, like Akademy, > something like two day workshops? > The thought process is currently at the stage of "Using funds for training might be a good idea”, so from the board’s perspective, anything is possible :) We’d have to see what would be the most efficient/effective overall.
> On my wishlist would be: > > - *Creative writing* - to help everybody improve their blogging and > presentation-composing skills. > > - *Public speaking* - to help everybody deliver better talks. > > If we are going to try and captivate larger audiences, we want to be able to > communicate better. Having developers, that already have a deep knowledge of > their own technology, be able to explain it in clear and interesting way, > will > help with that at internal and external events. > > I know for a fact that Sun used to do this for people they sent to speaking > venues, and you could always tell. > > I know many people think they can write because the have knowledge of > spelling > and grammar, or speak in public because they have... well, mouths, but this > is > a fallacy. There are plenty of things to learn to know how to structure and > compose a text, be it for a blog post, product announcement or script for a > presentation; as well as plenty of techniques you can acquire to make your > talks more interesting, bot at the organisational level and during the > execution. > > I, for one, would love to attend courses on this. > Thank you for these ideas!