On Friday 20 May 2011 19:07:59 Alan Clark wrote: > >>> On 5/13/2011 at 12:10 PM, in message <[email protected]>, > >>> Roger > > Luedecke <[email protected]> wrote: > > I think it might be a good move if training and certification were > > offered free to Ambassadors. Something like the Certified Linux > > Administrator. I think it would be a huge boon to assuring competent and > > helpful community. Thoughts? Can we harass Novell about this idea? > > Roger, > > I'm intrigued with this idea. I think that offering something like this to > our Ambassadors is a great idea, and ask for your help to make this idea > feasible. > > Here's my concern. > Since the process to become an Ambassador is very simple [1], we don't want > people signing up as Ambassadors simply as a free mechanism to get their > CLA. This would create work, clutter and noise to our community. People > would sign up and then we would never hear from them again. It would also > create extra expense (as in real $) to our community and/or SUSE as a > sponsor; money expended without benefit to our community.
We already have (or at least, had) people sign up as ambassador and not doing anything, so yes, there is a real concern. Moreover, CLA is not useful for everyone. Last but not least, the last thing in the world I want is to tell some ambassadors "you're doing enough work" and others "you're not doing enough". > Help me come up with a workable proposal. How can we offer this to "real" > Ambassadors and filter out those who would just abuse the benefit? > > As you pointed out " it would be a huge boon to assuring competent and > helpful community", it would be a great incentive to become an Ambassador > and a great personal benefit to the Ambassador (aka resume item). Agreed, it has real benefits. JDD's idea to give a limited number of most active ambassadors the exam makes a lot of sense. As Kim noted, it would be very hard to pick the top 10 active ambassadors, so I propose to use a different way of picking people: - we define a minimum-criterium like "must have been ambassador for 3 months and gone to at least 3 events and send in a report from at least 2 of those" kinf of thing - then anyone who fits the criteria can sign in on a lottery and the lucky 10 winners get their exam... That way, we ensure we don't have people who just join as ambassador for this program; but we don't have to do the complex ranking of 'most active ambassadors'. And we make sure only people who are interested get the exam. How feasible is this: You can probably build a way of 'subscribing to the lottery' on connect; you can simply only check the winners, see if they fit the criteria. If one of them doesn't, pick another person from the pool. That way, you only have to check a limited number of people. To do this, we need to do a few things: * figure out how feasible this is from SUSE's perspective: how expensive is it? Can it be done online? etc. I hope Alan can tell us that. * Then we need to come up with a reasonable list of criteria. It is a real bikeshedding thing and we can discuss such a list for ages so I'm inclined to simply call AJ, talk 10 minutes with him and decide on a list of criteria... But we can also ask for example Kim, JDD, chuck and Kostas to talk to Alan and the 5 of em come up with a good set of criteria. Don't start a list-wide discussion as it'll never end. We already make me wonder sometimes how incredibly successful our marketing would be if we wrote as much marketing texts as we wrote emails but unfortunately we don't :( * We need to ask the connect ppl if we can use connect for the lottery thing. * then simply make sure we have say 10 slots for CLA; tell the ambassadors to subscribe to the lotterly (if they fit the criteria); and do it. > Also by the way thanks for being willing to post the idea. > > Alan > > > > > > > > [1] http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Ambassadors#How_do_I_join.3F
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