 I have three speech ones after the other one, which give you an overview of the certification programs, where we are now and what we, in terms of the new committee, what is, we are supposed in the future to evaluate in terms of skills by the certified people. So the situation, we had the reviewer certification that has been active for two years. Actually the first, there is a trick on this side. Actually the first certified developers are going to expire in a month. So we will have the first set of renewal of certified developers. Just leave that open, otherwise it's become too dark. We will start and announce migration and training certification during the month of September. To start from October the 1st and for six months certification will be open only to TDF members. The reason is that with TDF members we have a more consolidated relationship and adding a more consolidated relationship with TDF members we can use these six months to improve the process because TDF process is slightly or very much different from the usual certification. It depends on how you see that. The examination is not the typical examination of certification programs. It is here to be reviewed. So we have a group of reviewers that are people that have already been active in those fields for a number of years. They are members of the community, they are members of the community for a long time. They experience migration and trainings. So they can evaluate how a candidate is ruled in that specific domain. The idea is not to certify everyone. It's to certify people that are really skilled in that field or past potential. In some cases we will have people that are quite young that have not been active for a long time but we know from his activity or we understand by reviewing him that he has potential for the future. That is an interest of the project to certify someone that has potential for improving. And of course we want to certify people that have been active and are being recognized for their activities in migrations and trainings. We start with TDF members again because the relationship with them allows us to test the review, the peer-to-peer review. Actually there is no certification program neither from the open source project nor from the proprietary software project to be based on peer-to-peer review. So we have tried to design it in a way that guarantees TDF from errors in certification because the problem is that you certify someone that is not good enough. A certified person becomes a kind of ambassador of your project because the certification gives him a recognition and he sells his services to the market, to someone that either wants to do migration or wants to be trained and in fact that would be of course a problem because it would affect the awareness of the certification problem. So what we want to avoid at first is avoid failures, avoid people that get certification but is not good enough to be certified. So at first we would be I would say more severe than expected. But if we are severe with TDF members we have a chance to explain them why we expect them to apply again if they fail or if they don't go to the examination. I think that the relationship is good enough that they will have to apply in three months time. Actually, for instance, if you look at certification in other open source projects like Frisco and like puppet labs if you fail certification for them you can apply for certification again, you can sustain the examination again in 48 hours. After two days, for us it will be three months. So if you fail certification for TDF you cannot go through the peer-to-peer review again not before three months because we think that if you fail you have to review your skills and preparation and 48 hours are not enough. So it's a logical amount of time to review your skills is three months. That gives you a chance to go through all the documents and to talk with someone and get a better preparation. Together with the Board of the Hector we have appointed a number of reviewers. These are people that come from different areas of the project and either they have been with TDF and with OpenOffice before for a long time or they have been active in a very successful migration project in the last two years. And of course as we want to promote certification when it will be open to the public and it will be open to the public starting from April 2015 so after six months we will prepare some marketing materials because we want people, we want to use certification to attract people to start there because they see a reason to create a business around their contribution to the realities. So developer certification is active since October 2012. It is a peer-to-peer review process. Of course being based on the code that you pushed to the source code it's easier in a sense that the peer review happens on actual contributions which are visible. So the decision of having a peer-to-peer review was based on the fact that this kind of peer-to-peer review was successful but of course it's different to peer. Peer review the code means that you peer review something visible. Peer review skills like training skills or migration skills is kind of reviewing the untouchable. So the process that we have built is a little bit more complex. Let's say that becoming a certified developer is probably easier if you have continuity in your contribution than becoming a migration or a certified trainer simply because the topic that you are covering is not as visible or not as touchable or not as possible to evaluate as code contributions. Code contributions is visible. Let's say that you can almost touch a code contribution if it works means that it's something that is positive. For the Canadian migration project you know that you have been good at doing that only at the end of the migration project not in between so it's a lot more difficult to evaluate. We will evaluate that on a number of variables but it's going to be more complicated but I think that our project has been up to very difficult tasks so I think that having this kind of certification is which is kind of unique. By the way, Linux Foundation has announced certification in Chicago two weeks ago and their certification is basically identical to TDIF certification with the difference that their review is a kind of peer-to-peer review but being targeted to a Linux engineer again is a peer-to-peer review that happens on something that you can touch. So they have a two hours review that is done on a console. So the other guy will look at what the candidate is doing on his console to either administer a Linux server or to do kind of changes or configuration of a Linux system. Of course it's targeted to the server side while we are mostly targeted to the desktop side which is a different story. Anyway, the developer certification has been very smooth so far. 42 certified developers, I would say every four months there is a new number of developers that are certified and this is handled by the engineers that are committed. So it's kind of external to the certification project in the sense that this is handled by developers for developers. Every of my national training have a more complicated number, a higher number of documents and a little bit more complicated. So be on the website and all the people that are in the review committee that review that or at least receive that, there will be these documents. Pre-requisite document that will explain to people which are the requisites to be certified. You have to be active in the project, you have to be active in a migration project, you have to be active in a training project. I have received the main reference for certification during the last two years. I have received emails from every kind of organization worldwide. People say I want to become certified by TEF because I have a certification from Cisco to Microsoft to everything and I want another one. And the answer in this case is very simple. Are you active? No. Then you will not be certified. It is not a matter. It is a recognition of something that you have done. Something that you have done properly and shows that either you are a real professional with experience or you are a professional with potential. These are the two figures that I see as certified. Either you are already experienced, lot of them. He has a migration project with his company in Germany. He knows how to do that. He is a reviewer of course. So he has not to explain again how to do that. So either he is someone like Lothar that is less known inside the project. And I am mentioning Lothar just because he is with me, but there are other people of course. So they have annual projects. So they have been recognized for that. So they do not have to explain again because they have managed that. They have managed the process. They have seen the exceptions. They have seen the obstacles. They have overtaken the obstacles. That is what I would call a professional. Of course a professional can do mistakes. We are humans. But the fact is that by recognizing the profession, you reduce the risk of mistakes from companies that hire the services of a professional. Of course the professional will have the experience. The other possibility is someone that has just followed one project. But during that project has shown a high potential. These two guys there, they are Italian. They are being involved in the migration of the world. Which has been extremely successful. So Marina is actually certified. She is a reviewer again. But as I said, she is the most technical guy inside the Italian project. And sorry for the guy. But Alfredo is just out of the university. But he has been instrumental for the Liberumbria migration. So we cannot say that he has a lot of experience. But he has shown that he has a large, huge potential. And he is safe enough to understand when there is a problem. And when there is a problem to search for within the project. Which is what we want from certified people. You cannot know everything about every problem with LibreOffice. It's such a huge problem. So you may have an issue, let's say, with RTF compatibility. Just by chance. We have quite a large number of issues in Italy with RTF compatibility. But if you get an issue, and Lothar I imagine that you have a passing. And of course, if you have an issue with RTF compatibility. What we expect is that you, within the project, you start to ask forever to others that may have a similar problem. And in a way that either together we solve the problem or you are inspired by, for a workaround, by someone that has already found a workaround for that problem. So we don't want people that goes around and invents solutions. We want people that looks into the project to find solutions. We are a community, and we should never forget that we are a community. And therefore we, for people that are already inside the community, of course this is not a problem. They already know how to leverage the community. For people that is outside the community, we have to teach them how to leverage the community. People that comes out after six months and says, oh you know, I do not deploy in your office because there was a problem. I think that the answer that we have to give these guys is do not wait six months to address the problem with the community. Because the community can help you. Maybe, I mean, there might be chances that the community is not able to help you because you are the first to stumble into a problem. But there are chances that the community or someone within the community can help you because you have a similar problem in other markets. And someone has solved a problem, let's say, on the Italian version of LibreOffice, but maybe that workaround may work on the German version on the French version on any other version. So we have to teach people, to educate people to become part of the community. We cannot be like a proprietary project where there is competition or, let's say, commercial competition between certified people. They try to steal customers from each other because that is the way this project works. We have a community, so we expect competition on the market but collaboration within the community. So you help each other because you know that this time is your turn to help you, but next time you will help me in solving the problem. This is fundamental because if we don't get over this education step, we will never, we will be mimicking Microsoft Office certification without having Microsoft Office commercial power. So certification is not going to work. We have to do something that is within our chances, within our possibilities. Then there is the certification agreement and certification policies document. These are documents that actually give a frame of rules that regulate the relationship between the certified guy and TDF. Of course, the agreement says that as a certified person you cannot represent TDF officially. You can only say that you are certified by TDF but you don't become a TDF representative because you are certified. Of course, this was not originally as a document but going and studying a little bit more about the certification and especially by comparing us with other open source projects. Every open source project has a certification agreement that has to be signed by the certified person because at the end I had a very large discussion with Puppet Labs just because I know more people there. They gave me a number of cases where the certification agreement managed to protect them against people that were certified and they probably did not deserve certification. By the way, Puppet Labs handles examination in a completely different way with multiple choice answers, which is the typical way of handling certification. I think that multiple choice should be avoided anyway because in a project like Liberal Office it could be very easy to answer multiple choice questions. It's probably a lot more difficult to answer questions about how you evaluate the migration to Liberal Office of a 1000 seat company. It's something that you cannot answer with a multiple choice. You have to give your comments. You have to show that you have a strategy in mind for these kind of tasks. It's not just telling me, you know, you replace Microsoft Office with Liberal Office and you're done. You're not done this way. You're done with a more complex process. You need communication in between. You need pilot testing. You need a lot of steps to be filled before you are able to get to the end of the migration. Then we have a Code of Conduct. Code of Conduct is a natural document. It's what we expect from a certified person. What we expect in terms of behavior by a certified person. A long Q&A document that clarifies more or less several aspects is 20 pages at the moment, but it's going to grow because of course the idea is that during the first six months we will probably be faced as reviewers with a number of questions that we have not yet talked about and as soon as we get those questions they will be added to the Q&A document to improve it and to make it more comprehensive. I tried and I got some contribution about it. I tried to be comprehensive, but of course it's difficult to be really totally comprehensive if you don't go through the real process. Peer-to-peer review process. There is a description of the process. The process is three-step. So basically you fill the application. The application is online. It's not yet online, but it will be online as soon as we announce the program. You fill the application. The application asks you, of course, your data, it asks you to summarize your experience and to provide some documents, documents that are related to your certification. So if you have migrated a large company, it will ask you either to provide the migration program, the migration flow, or any other document that allows the reviewers to understand which is the process that you have adopted. If it's a training, it asks you to provide the training materials, the training slides. Of course it's confidential. We will not make that public to everyone, but this will allow reviewers to understand a little bit more about you. So reviewers will get these documents. These documents will be analyzed. And there will be an email that goes to the candidate and asks for clarification. It's especially in a multilingual environment as we are. There will be areas where maybe this has been written, I don't know, in Dutch, and ONICOR knows Dutch, so maybe it will allow us to provide something more in English to allow other reviewers to understand more about the process. This in Italian is going to be the same. Of course I can translate from Italian to English and you can translate from Dutch to English, but I think that we have to make the process as international as we can. So to ask people to make an effort to explain in English and to make all the reviewers aware of what he has done. Each review will be handled by three people, and the documents will be available to all reviewers. Because I think this is a group process. So if a reviewer is not involved in the review of that candidate as a question, the reviewers will ask that question because that is important. Because only by doing that as a real group I think we can improve the process. Otherwise it's going to be a three person process and doesn't reflect the fact that we are a community. In a community everyone can contribute and I expect that every reviewer can contribute to the process. According to his experience, there are people more experienced in one area and people more experienced in another one. So you ask the questions, the candidate will answer and this is the second step. And the third step is that based on the answer provided by the candidate, ten days before the review which will happen either face to face or by Skype hangouts or we want to see people in the face. Meaning, not on the phone. We want to see the face of the guy that is going to be reviewed. Ten days before we give him an idea of the questions that he will receive during the peer-to-peer review and we will give him a couple of tasks to fulfill for the review. The tasks can be either build 20 slides to explain how to do main merge with LibreOffice and just invent it at the moment but produce 20 original slides to explain how would you explain main merge to others. Or if it is for migration, which kind of communication strategy you would adopt in this kind of environment? Of course, we want people to show that in a limited amount of time which reflects the real situation because when you have a customer that asks you for a migration project, you don't have a customer that tells you today about the migration project and you have to wait six months. You have 10, 15 days to prepare the first project. So we want to reproduce the same environment. Ten days you send us a document and of course we understand that it has been done in 10 days but we want to see how you react under pressure because this is a pressure and migration is a work that puts you under pressure because you have the company on one side and you have to use it on the other one and you are pressed by both. If you are training, it's the same because you have the guy that wants you to do the training as fast as you can. And on the other side, you have the guy that wants to learn as slow as he can because of course he wants to understand if he cares about using LibreOffice. So we have to reproduce a little bit. Of course, it's impossible. We have to find general tools. It's impossible to reproduce every specific situation but we try to reproduce a real situation because then we want to be sure that when we have certified something we can trust that he will perform in the best way. He will be an added value for the Document Foundation and LibreOffice. Otherwise, we don't want to give medals to people. We want to grow the ecosystem so we want to grow a group of people that we can trust that they can contribute, that can criticize if necessary but we want to have a lively number of people that can help us in improving the process making certification a better process and we want to be proud of certification and people should say TDF has done it in the proper way. Then we have the protocols that are a reference because the protocols can be improved. The idea is not to provide the protocols the idea of the protocols is to provide documents that are deep enough to explain people or to show people that we have a methodology but not deep enough to make people totally independent otherwise we don't need the ecosystem. So if we allow everyone based on the protocols to do the migration on their own then Lothar would never sell these services again or Studio Storti would not sell these services in Italy or Paul would not sell these services in Germany in the Netherlands. We want people to understand that there is a methodology and that it makes sense to hire a certified person to implement that methodology because it makes sense. At the end it will be a saving of money. You will spend money but at the end you will save money because by putting your migration of training in the hands of someone that is knowledgeable about that then you will be safe. At the end you will save money just because you will do it once and it will be a complete project at the first shot and not go over and over and I'm sure that Lothar for instance can give you stories about projects where you have to go back and retrain people tomorrow obviously and retrain people because that was not done in the proper way the first time maybe because the company said we don't want to spend that much time on training so we want to limit the amount of hours for training so if a certified trainer tells you in 24 hours we want to be sure that after 24 hours people will be training in a proper way and we want him to be in the position of telling the company look I can only guarantee that of course after that amount of training or that timing for the migration it will not work if you want to do it in a different way we want certification to become a kind of land of kind of reference in general for people to be able to have better sales weapons for their services and then there is a number of reference documents the reference documents are are generic but for instance on the website there will be all the documents published by the UK government about standardizing on DF because that is there is a standard there is a strategy document there is an implementation document so this will help people of course you are not supposed to take these documents and reproduce that but you can to explain the importance of using for DF as a standard you can of course it is more convincing to use the UK government documents than to use documents that are written by you so to say that you a government with all these standard bodies are decided for DF so you can download those documents from the website handle that to the company use them as a reference for your documents of course we will we will make sure that all the documents are properly licensed in a way that everyone can can get the documents and use them if they are not licensed we will say that they are not licensed so you can read the documents of course but you cannot use the documents as a reference for your documents the website these are this is the status all the pages are in draft format so if you access the website you won't see them but they are in the staging area of our website I think that we will announce around mid September so in 10 days from the end of the conference or less and the website will be populated of course the bibliography is working progress because as soon as other documents are published we will publish them online these are the reviewers these are the people that have been involved of those people 13 men only Chakirin and Vibhura is not in the group all the others you know the okings that have all been agreed about being part of this review committee which is not a body it's a committee just because you have to call it in a way a group or anyway the idea is that we coordinate the group of course there is people in some areas that know more than me about some of these of these or some topics the idea is that I try to be in all review committees in all reviews just to provide a kind of coordination so that the way that we review people is uniform across the entire group of course this is important at first because no one of them I've done the test of the review together with the board no one of the reviewers has still done the test we'll probably do that during the month of September by talking individually with all the guys and in a way from October 1st when people will apply we will be able to provide reviews in a consistent way by the way if I I know personally it's not significant but I know personally all these persons but people like Hans Kor Olivier Sophie and Walter I think we have met for the first time eight, ten years ago more or less so it's and the new guys like Eliane which is I mean it's rather new it's not totally new but it's came into the project after Olivier I've been around Thomas has been around for years in the German community Stefano has been the leader of the Libriundia Migration Life is the leader of the Danish community has been active in migrations he has migrated all the system of Copenhagen hospitals to LibreOffice 25,000 seats so I'm pretty sure that it's going to be easy to coordinate people that has such a deep experience Gustavo is migrating the old infrastructure of the state of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil to LibreOffice which means offices in different cities in different environments so if everyone has quite a deep knowledge and understanding of what we are going to review so it's going to be easy to coordinate such a good group of people in terms of marketing we will have probably by the end of October brochures in BDF format I would really like to avoid having them printed but they might be printed just because printing it costing a huge amount of money and then people throw away 85%, 90% of what you're printing and I expect someone that wants to be certified to be able to read that BDF document on the screen otherwise I strongly think that it should not be certified and videos to promote certification of course we have different problems because in countries like Germany, Italy France, in most of Europe I would say not in Spain but Spain unfortunately for the for our community has been a historical problem has been managed let's say that the Spanish community has never been managed in a proper way and so Spain is something that we have to face not with certification but with growing the community first but in all of Europe there have been migrations the need for promoting the certification is not as large as it is for instance in the States in the Spanish speaking countries where the impact of the project and I mean of an office before and the document foundation afterwards has been deeper of course in many of the European countries the fact that to implement or to employ your office in your company you have to go through a process that you need to go to training is not a fact for everyone but at least it's a fact for the open source environment for all the people that are involved in IT in the States people are not convinced that you cannot deploy your office in a company in a Microsoft office just because the situation of the community is not there the country is fragmented as the problem the issues are completely different next six months we certify TDF members of course in the process we will improve the peer-to-peer review and we will review certification training courses because the certified TDF members is going to be a test for everyone the application is open only to TDF members in some cases and exceptionally people who are sitting in the review committee have the faculty of suggesting people to be certified so of course if you know someone that is not a TDF member but is knowledgeable enough to be certified I think that these people have a chance to suggest the name the people in any case will have to go through the process and the same process of everyone else so they will have to go with the application and so on people that is not active in migration and training they can be knowledgeable as they can but they will have to go through the training training is this of course is what we target with improving the peer-to-peer review as any process it has to be balanced the three-step have to be balanced at the moment we figure out that the three-step have more or less the same way with of course the face-to-face review being the most important one but we don't know I mean we will evaluate what happens when the first people will apply we will see the skills that they have and according to their skills we will adapt the process the first objective of course is to create a set of basic questions the idea is not to ask the same questions to the people the idea is to evaluate them in a consistent way so that we have we are sure that we can ask more or less the similar questions or we test more or less the similar skills in everyone of course having a set of basic questions will help us because you can be creative but having at least a set that you can check out we have asked about trainings we have asked about communication the job of the reviewers and the objective is to make the process repeatable because if the certification is a successful project so far we have been successful in almost everything we have done so we hope to be as successful with the certification as in other projects the 12 reviewers original reviewers will not be enough this is not a work there is probably going to be a coverage of the expenses but it cannot be a job so we cannot expect people to spend all day in reviewing the work so we want to make the process repeatable because I think that we will have to a number of reviewers and the new reviewers coming into the project we will have to get a standard reference to repeat what the others have done otherwise it is going to be limited at first I will be doing all reviews for the 36 months then we will see I don't know at the moment how many people will apply so it is difficult to say and the reviewer certification training because what we have decided and this is because of the people that have asked to be certified so we have I've got questions about certification for people that have never never had to do with open source software so in this case you have to do two options you tell these guys the chances of being certified if you don't know anything about open source and the other the other option is to train them and see out area it doesn't mean that they will get certified but we will at least give them a chance so there will be there will be trainings that will explain about software we will explain about free software and so on these are the general topics free software, government standards interaction with the community how to contribute and so on I can tell you that in the last six months I took with a number of Italians that were in let's say in key positions in rather large local administrations about standards documents or about standards in general and the most knowledgeable new zero the less knowledgeable the negative knowledge about that so I'll consider RTF a standard which is not a standard we have heard that XLS is a standard and funny things like that of course we cannot accept at all that someone with a TDF certification is not able to sustain discussion about standards so about ODF PDF fonts that are open source fonts that are multi-platform which are key for interoperability because the problem is the reality is that we LibreOffice can only be deployed if you deploy that in an interoperable environment so you can deploy to the office only if interoperability is guaranteed and interoperability is guaranteed only if you know how to deploy and implement standards standard document formats and so on then for migration about the migration protocols best practices and so on there is quite a lot we are still not define how long the training will be but I think it is going to be 3 to 5 days and if people want to be certified they will have to go open of course we will have to monitor the process and monitor for consistency and for quality and I think that certified people or people that are willing to be certified the fact that they will participate in the conference in the future will be considered a plus or a need because being in a conference is like a crash course in community and we cannot accept the fact that people is not at ease with community I think it is just impossible I mean I have seen some made of people that have answered to my reply I don't see why I should lose my time on your mailing lists and my answer was sorry but if this is your attitude you will never be certified because if you think that being a member of the mailing list is a loss of time you are just approaching the problem from the wrong side from the wrong part being on the mailing list helps you in understanding the community helps you in knowing about how to solve problems how to interact with other people is a key asset is not a loss of time and we have also to think about the review cycle because for certified developers you have to go but for other people you don't have to go, so ask about what you have done in the last six months some ideas for the future in English there is an open source platform for for deployment of online courses is total open source the idea is probably to use their platform because they are very popular especially in the States they are a project of the University of Stanford they are very popular in the States you can find courses of any subject on EDH there is history, economy everything three courses there will give us some visibility because of course we can leverage their visibility to improve our visibility but we will be starting with our infra team the possibility of having our own instance of EDH on our servers to deploy the let's say the biggest courses and also to offer that as a service to organizations that are creating the courses we might design or we might try to collaborate in the Reynolds Foundation again their certification is very similar to ours although it's focused on the server and we have to evaluate about third party test providers like Ligu's professional institute at the moment we don't see the need for that but in the future it's possible so this is the first one if you agree I would go through the other two that are about the and then you can ask all the questions all together