 This is all very exciting. Thank you. Thank you all for coming to a session that's contending for the longest titled session at a Drupal con ever. And I apologize for that. The main fact is how do you know that gal knows Drupal? Sorry, I need to speak less into it. And by really what it's about is towards, what's putting forward some ideas towards an open curriculum and an open certification system for the Drupal community. Now, you can actually follow, keep notes and make comments. We set up this etherpad area. So if you go to etherpad.com. For example, Drupal cert, it's just kind of like a live area as these things go. So just go ahead and feel the free to put questions in there, make comments, anything you would like. This is what it looks like if you go to that. And please enter your name here so that we know who those comments are coming from. You don't have to do it, but you can do it just so we can later on keep commenting that way. All right. And then later on we will have a discussion, we'll start a discussion at Drupal.groups, the groups at Drupal.org on the curriculum and training group. So let me first introduce ourselves. My name is Dominic Lukesh. I've been with Drupal for a while. This is if you think about the sort of what you know about people in the Drupal community. Well, I have a certified to rock score four. I've been doing it since 2006. I've started a few groups on groups.drupal.org. I've done a bunch of Drupal concessions. I've installed Drupal in many, many times in many different ways. And I run a bunch of sites. Some of them Drupal, some of them WordPress. So that's the sort of thing you might want to know about somebody in Drupal like me. And right now I work for dyslexia action. Now. Hi, and my name is Heather James. And you can find me on Twitter as learning Drupal. I'm Heather on D.O., but on IRC I'm nearly there because I didn't kind of, I don't have a consistent identity online. My certified to rock score is six and I really throw off the curve because I consider myself the eternal noob. I've been using Drupal. I started as the cheap option working for not-for-profits and now Drupal is the main part of my job. I administer to groups on Drupal.org and I've run some camp sessions. I've helped co-organize local groups and I have no idea how many different modules I've installed and tried. I work for Acquia in case that isn't obvious by the slide. Okay. So can we just maybe get a quick sense of who you are just, I mean not personally individually but if you raise your hand if you're a Drupal trainer. All right. That looks like about just as a record it looks like a majority of people. Yeah, which is as expected. Anybody here who works, who teaches Drupal in a formal education like schools, universities. So three or four people. Anybody who has experience with certification programs. Either taking certain, five or six. And anybody who is here as a potential consumer of a certification program who would like to administer it or take it or hire people based on certifications. Yeah. And I'm sure about eight. So there's a nice kind of a Spanish wave going through here. And so again, if you want to introduce yourself say a little bit more about what you're interested in and you can go to the ether pad and make some notes there. Make a nice summer record. So this is what we're gonna talk about. We're quickly just talk about some of the key terms because there's a lot of confusion in terminology. Then Heather will talk about the context of the community as we see it at the moment. And then she will quickly go through a bunch of different models of certifications other open source communities and non open source, non communities have used. Then I will go through some ideas. I call it mostly some sort of preliminary ideas for what an open certification program could look like. That would kind of go nicely with the ethos of the community. And then at the end we're hoping to have some space for discussion. And we're also started a buff that follows the session immediately. So if anybody will be interested we can just go over to the buff area and just gonna keep on talking there if anybody's interested. So I've been kind of around all these discussions about curriculum and Drupal and certification. There's a lot of terms that gets thrown around that very often people sort of mean different things by their certification, curriculum accreditation and all of these things kind of get confused. So the way we start off with a curriculum is not a syllabus. It's not just a set of materials as many people refer to it. It's not just a course. And curriculum in the sense that we mean it defines competencies on which you build a syllabus and on which you can then build some materials to run a course. So it's something that comes before all of these other things. It's kind of a foundation for the educational environment. Now curriculum also needs to account for the fact that learning and knowledge is not linear. So whereas some basic knowledge can take you weeks to achieve or days even, then as you go along there's simply no way to achieve knowledge in kind of a linear fashion as you know if you've been around for years the way the knowledge kind of expands in an exponential way. And it's very often very often difficult to account for the types of knowledge people have at this stage of their careers because they haven't just followed the kind of building blocks progression. Now as I mentioned the curriculum as being defined by competencies very often and then these comments should relate to the real life that people, real life needs of people. And then if they're good competencies then they should be linked to some particular learning materials that then can be easily and also they should be easily assessed. So for instance let me just give you some examples. So of a competency, so install Drupal 6 on a lamp server or select and install appropriate modules for Drupal 6 to enable listing of content. So those are sort of competencies that you can design some materials for, you can teach them, you can assess that somebody can do them whereas there's a bunch of sort of what I call pseudo competencies that such as know how modules are used in Drupal. Well you cannot really build and you cannot build particular materials, you cannot really easily assess this in a way that you can say this person actually knows this partly because of that sort of funnel thing as well. Now I just want to acknowledge for any sort of educational philosophers in the room, there's a lot of controversy about defining curriculum through competencies particularly through what's called behavior descriptors and I'm not actually proposing to sort of commit to a philosophy of what knowledge is and what competencies are, but I just want to acknowledge that this could be controversial but I just want to say competencies that are defined in a practical way are very suitable tools and for building a curriculum and having discussions about and that's kind of what I'm talking about. Now certification is the other concept, very often it's people just think of it as an exam or as a course or some sort of an accreditation. So it's really not any of these things the way we talk about it. It is basically what you might call what I sort of define is there's a statement by a trusted body about the level of competence of a person who carries a certification. So that basically means it's all about trust. Somebody says about something about somebody and you trust that person who's saying that. So that's the key thing. Whereas if you just kind of define certification as some sort of a test, well very often these tests or assessments are just kind of remind me of a voodoo doll. They're similar to the real world but you have to put a lot of faith into some sort of a magic of the testing that it actually defines that person. So actually the results on a test are kind of more similar to the doll than the person that you want to know about. And so however and the certification doesn't have to be based on a unitary assessment. It can be based on tests and exam results but also on observed performance, completion of a course and Heather will talk about these or portfolio or just a membership in an organization. Okay and so finally accreditation is the thing that actually it's the certification for people who certify other people. So again it's the next chain in the trust and we'll talk more about how the trust can work. We're fine. So Drupal up until now we really could think of people getting employment through word of mouth reference where really we always talk about the Drupal.org profile as someone's ultimate CV, a real representation of the work that they do and as vetted by the community. However today the Drupal demand really outstrips the available talent and clients are really unsure how to assess the skills of the people they want to hire or work with. And then there's many skill developers who are actually invisible because they're not participating in the community either by chance or just by the work that they're doing. And developers themselves who are new to Drupal they're not really sure how to start learning Drupal and then experienced developers are really unsure of where to go next. And so we see this coming up time and again. So we could really think about this issue of certification in terms of the context of these different perspectives. So from the new Drupalist perspective how can I get started or what's next for me for the community? How can we validate this person's skills and then what needs are there in the community right now? And then from a client perspective how can I find the right person and who am I looking for? And there has been a great effort in training up until now. There's a lot of development shops they share their development expertise and offer public and private training. They're either using their custom made materials or they're using some of the great books out there as textbooks and yet people are going into the training and there's really no way to see what those people have done and how they're accumulating their skills. And there are also as an alternative to that a lot of Drupal training is available online. There's plenty of free resources out there. There's primary sources, there's Learn by the Drop, Drupal Dojo, there's many different aggregators out there as well as paid resources, Drupalize Me, Build a Module, lynda.com and providing some really great chances for people to learn just as valid as classroom training. And there have been any conversations about Drupal certification right up until now and at the risk of almost glossing over it I do want to refer anyone who's watching the presentation later on or is here in the room and hasn't seen it before to go and watch the presentation of the panel on certification in Chicago. And these were three different alternatives to certification that were shown. Just as briefly Drupal Guilds was presented by Aaron Winborn and it's actually a way of bringing people into a guild system and giving them credit for the work they're doing but really a person to person system. Certified to Rock is an algorithm that uses a black box method of judging someone's public contributions and giving them a score. And Lullabot themselves also offer a certificate of attendance and Jeff spoke about that as well. Jeff Robbins, yes. So and in that Greg Nattison really gave a very good history of the certifications that were available up until now and I won't repeat everything he has to say here but there have been efforts towards Drupal certification and we're sort of, I think we're sort of like trying to continue that conversation. So one thing that hasn't been done yet is to really look at a comparison of models that are out there and think about how we can learn from other certification programs. In terms of the training and the actual assessment method, excuse me, the delivery of the assessment, there's a lot of different methods. There's paper, we think of like a paper based exam. It's consistent, there's a perception of objectivity. It can be easily translated, easily maintained updated performance based assessment is also seen as very rigorous but also very costly and portfolio based assessment is comprehensive but then there's a perception of subjectivity. All the models we'll look at have some way that they're validated. We talked about trust metrics briefly. This is the IT certification council for example. They actually help to validate the work of organizations that certify over a thousand individuals a year or something like that. And there's things like the credential clearing house and there's these bodies that oversee. And the H certification or each sort of method we're looking at always provides some type of evidence. So either they have some type of, the organization has some type of accreditation. The learner takes an exam and there's some type of provider who's actually delivering the certification and there's some type of issuer who then verifies the certification. In fact, say if you took a Cisco certification you would be able to go check Cisco certificates.com go to verify, put in your ID number and your certification would then be validated to your potential employer for example. And each of the models we're looking at we could sort of picture it on the scale. We've got here the top skills and down to rep that means reputation and over on the right some systems are tighter and on the left some systems are looser. And we kind of can plot these on a chart later on. We can also see that some certifications where the early levels of entry for example in Cisco certification could be a lot easier and lower barrier to entry and much easier to start with where they could get more complex and more difficult later on. And we can see how we can apply that to our situation. And you may have other models as you're listening please go to ietherpad.com, Drupal cert and look at some of the topic models and see if you'd like to add some. So we've heard a little bit about some of these certifications that are available in the Linux community like the Linux Professional Institute, the Red Hat certification and Ubuntu themselves have started a certification. And they're sort of very similar to some of the commercial type certification being exam based. What I'd like to say about these here it's interesting that these are seen as valued by employers. We have to wonder as well why they're valued by employers. Cisco gives discounts to people who take their certification to their partners and more certified employees. You have the greater discounts that you can actually avail of and Adobe and Microsoft have similar types of programs. So while employers probably value them because they do give or a rigorous reputable check of someone's skills they're also valued for their reasons. So probably better for us to look at some open source models. And there are a variety of different ones we can talk about. I'd like to look at detail for a moment at type of three. Type of three is another very popular open source CMS. It's very popular in mainland Europe and it is another similar type of community. They see certification as very important for the same reasons we do. They have the type of, this is sort of like the slide you don't wanna have. It's important to take away from here is the type of three integrator is sort of a correlates to our site builder. And this person doesn't install type of three. They simply know how to configure it when it's pre-installed and it's valid for every major version and it does not expire. And the questions, there's actually guidelines for question writing and questions are submitted by people in the community. And the paper-based actually they're delivered through a paper-based examination and they're associated with all of their different types of community events and it's 200 Euro. There are some great, obviously, events within their community and yet they don't have coverage everywhere. There's none in the UK, US, or Canada. Zend is another model. It's similar to a lot of the commercial type of certification and it's large scale and it's tied very closely to their course preparation. And Umbreco is even more closely tied with our course materials to the point where you simply take the two-day course at 775 pounds and you receive your certification after completion of the course. It's a little bit like the Lullabot model of certificate of completion. Red Hat, on the other hand, if we think about that scale again or that graph, Red Hat has, for example, in the higher end, the performance-based exams. So these are similar to where someone's performing some type of task on the job and they get verified. And almost on the other end of that scale, we'll plot these in a second. We have the WordPress User Association. This actually is a paid community of different levels, basic premium sponsor. And you simply have to pay to join the community and voila, you get access to their videos. You get an official WPUA seal for your website and you get, right here, you gain community certification levels of pro and expert. I was so confused about this. In fact, of course, I contacted them and asked them what they meant. They actually really literally mean you have to pay and you get the certification. And it's actually quite simple. I'm like my throat sticking together. Oh, what a great code presenter. I came making them for water. Anyway, that's gonna get recorded great. Right, so WordPress just came out. I don't know if anyone noticed. CodePoet just came out. CodePoet is a, it's actually now, so far from something we're talking about certification, but it actually answers that question for the clients. Where can I find somebody? How can I find somebody that I can, you know, who can do the things I need, the services I need. It's quite small here. Well, we have, for example, performance and scaling, security, theme development. In order to get listed on here, one thing, first, number one, is spell WordPress, right? So anyone know how to do that? You have to make sure the detect capital P is in the middle there, and it's one word. Another thing is you have to link to your website where you actually list your WordPress services. And yet, you know, they're simply, they are, it's checked by a human, and it's really a reputation-based system. So let's see now. We've seen a couple different models. Maybe you're sharing some now. We've got Red Hat up here, which really talks about skills and a much tighter type of system. Whereas the other side of that, we have type of three, which talks about skills when it's much looser. Code poet then would be something that's really focused on reputation rather than skills, but it's much looser. We're certified to rock, focus on reputation, but we really have literally no control over it. So, how bad are we? Okay. I saved this model for the last because I find that this is a very inspiring model. It's called the Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure, so we're gonna nickname it OB. It's quite different from any of the other systems that we've looked at, and I think it's really relevant to our open source project. And this is a sort of a schematic that they've drawn. Up here at the top, we can see some badge issuers. We have an after-school program, online learning, or a culinary institute. So you can see what they're trying to say is that there are many different ways you can gain learning. We're really moving to a life of online learning now. Or sorry, lifelong learning now. Sorry. And each one of these issuers creates a type of badge or it's a verifiable quantity. It's a quantifiable value of your abilities. And the learner can then apply for these badges. These are then submitted to this learner, and the learner then can share them in their badge backpack, which they also have control over what displays. I'm just gonna scroll down the image here. From then the badge backpack, this information can be shared through your website, through various social media profiles, and any type of resume or employment sites. And the end result then, of course, is jobs, other educational opportunities, and unlocking new privileges. It's always good to keep on thinking of the end goal for people for improving themselves. I'm gonna leave this, this is a bit about their open badge system infrastructure, if you wanna talk about that later. But there are other systems out there that are working. There is the Orchid Open Researcher Contributor ID, which simply solves the problem of trying to keep track of one's, one writer's or one author's contributions. And it's similar to that certification I mentioned about Cisco, where you have some type of verifiable certification system. They tested it internally. These are some badges, for example. You know, fellow of the arts participated in 25 design challenges. They also tested it with real people on P2PU, which is an open peer-to-peer, kind of, it's kind of like study groups online. So one of these badges they have, for example, is an open source contributor badge. And so here, someone can have a simple badge where someone just has to actually assess this challenge. Someone else, a peer, has to vote yes, one vote, and then yes, you can receive this badge. And so it's a very simple example. And you're probably wondering, well, who's gonna actually write all of those little tasks? Who's actually doing that? It could be, for example, a community organization. It could be a commercial training provider. It could be peers that are creating and issuing badges. We have a good example of this in the Views Bug Squad. The solution to a very unwieldy, large queue was to make it easier for people who could help triage the Views Issue queue. And over here, we see the triage tasks, which would be great novice tasks. And then over on the left, we have some developer tasks, sort of a schematic of how they're organizing their group. And that's just happening in one place in Drupal.org, but there's also a site called Open Hatch, which is about getting all types of people involved from into all different types of open source communities. My throat's sticking together again. For example, they have training missions. These were put together by a fellow who was doing a Google Summer of Code project. We've got using Diff and Patch, using Subversion, using Git, using TAR. We're training people how to do this in our Drupal community. They're doing it on an Open Hatch. What if we put people through this system here and saved, basically, didn't reinvent the wheel? We've even added some Drupal tasks. For example, we have any open issue queues marked novice. You could have more granular tasks as well. This was started by, I just think this is a kind of a little bit of a tangent, but it's worth mentioning that Ashish Leroy, he actually did a presentation called Growing the Community Through Outreach and Diversity. And he really framed the question of, how can you get people from disadvantaged backgrounds involved in open source? Why is that important for us? We want to grow the community if we're locking out or making it difficult for people from different backgrounds. We're losing the chance to grow in all directions. And yet he co-started Open Hatch and doesn't seem to really anything about diversity. And as Webchik put it, there are extremely privileged people who still can't grok how the issue queues work. So if we can solve the problem for everybody, we make it easier for everyone to get involved in open source. So we're really saying, what if the training methods were of a variety? What if there were courses? What if there was informal learning? What if there was self-directed learning? And what if there were a variety of assessment methods so that there was exams for certain people which were appropriate to what skills are being assessed, portfolios, or vouched? And what if all this information that was federated where the evidence was easy to find and also validated? So that leads on to you. Thank you. Can I just say that this is an awesome survey that Heather did and I thank you so much for doing that. I think that we'll need to revisit this perhaps many, many more times because there's just so much happening and it's so easy to think there's just one way of doing things and obviously there's so many different ways. So thank you, I've seen this before but I've seen it again, I'm even more impressed, so thank you. So I just want to talk about based on all of these issues and all the great diversity in the Drupal community and in sort of the educational and certification sphere all together, I just want to talk about some ideas that perhaps we could use to build some an open certification program, open curriculum and sort of a community-based certification for Drupal. Now I'm to subtitle here some generative metaphors and generative metaphors are metaphors that you just kind of use a metaphor to shed a light on something, not saying that something is really like something, I just kind of what if we kind of for a while imagine something as something else. So I'm not actually making a specific proposal with a set parameters, I'm just going to try to present a perspective, a different way of looking at things and hopefully we can through some discussion maybe move this forward. So let me just start with a brief story, about three years ago I was at a local college, very much like Croydon College, which is not in the UK for those of you who are from abroad, it's not a university, it's just a further education college. I was teaching a web design of substituting for somebody and I was giving a curriculum, which was fine and then some materials were the curriculum and that was in 2008 and they were suggesting that if you want to change a color you will use a font tag and then set the color on there and that was in 2009. I was just appalled, that is awful if you want to teach web design, that's wrong. So my initial instinct was I was involved in the Drupal community was how can I tell someone where is the issue queue for this sort of a problem? This is a problem with the curriculum, how do we fix it, how do we release it? And obviously I realized there isn't a way of doing that. The curriculum is controlled by a commercial enterprise, I'm not sure exactly what their legal state is, but basically they do it for profit and they sell these curricula and the certifications to colleges who then run these courses for them and they also provide the assessment and certification but they do it for, it's kind of a commercial deal. So my idea based on that thing, what if we could do curriculum development that is like open source code development. So remember this is a generative metaphor, I'm just saying let's brief a look at curriculum development and see if we can shed some different light on it through that. So how do we generate open source code? So we all know this is in the open source code it's happening in public, in the Drupal world we have some maintainers of different parts of the code, whether it's modules or now we have these initiatives. We rely on submissions of patches, of little bits of fixes for code or new code from submitters. We have different branches of development that then lead to releases that have different numbers and then we kind of know what that means. And we also have a number of compatibility devices such as automatic tests or APIs or coding standards, all of these other things that we can make sure that the code works together. Now how is curriculum developed? And this is incredibly complicated world of curriculum development. Basically it is usually public. So it's not that different because you have to tell somebody what the curriculum is and even though there are commercial providers who don't kind of keep the course and curriculum secret. It has maintainers, but those maintainers are essentially some sort of authorities. Some people who really don't take any guff from anybody. This is how it is. It is incredibly difficult as I discovered to submit updates unless you are one of the people who design, who's nominated by some authority to do the curriculum. It is occasionally revised, but as we saw in 2008 that particular web development, web design curriculum was still using font tags. So it's very inflexible. But it does, and for compatibility it does things like it has approved textbooks for that particular curriculum, approved courses around that curriculum and related materials and also assessments. So as we see that actually we could take, you see these green arrows, we could take the ideas from the open source code development and actually quite nicely match them onto what's happening in code development and in curriculum development and perhaps make them better by putting in some of this openness in. So we could then have a curriculum that is public and completely public, not perhaps only partially public. There has maintainers that would be sort of individuals or small groups who would say I'm responsible for this branch and make sure that it's always up to date and it works and the people can submit patches to make sure that updates, not patches, but updates that are patch-like that fix little bits of it if they become out of date. And the updates are regular and kind of transparent in their regularity. So you know which version of the curriculum you're dealing with and then actually that the community can then submit compatible materials, activities, courses, assessments, et cetera, et cetera. Now the metaphor breaks down a little bit because the curriculum isn't exactly like code. So if you actually design some materials that are not compatible with those particular competencies that could still mean that it will still work but nothing breaks down immediately. So there's a bit of a sort of a flaw in that metaphor here but let's imagine that we could sort of, we could just through discussion and sort of a community involvement maintain the compatibility. So what would then the open Drupal curriculum look like? Well it would be some sort of publicly accessible guidelines that would be organized around some competency areas that would kind of cover the different Drupal skills and profiles, skill profiles perhaps you could say or skill needs. And each of them would have a maintainer and they would have patches and versions that would get regular releases so that people could then go look at this is the most up-to-date version of sort of a statement of Drupal skills and knowledge and so on. And as I mentioned at the beginning, the competency, each of the competencies should also be so defined that it actually defines the compatibility with different types of learning materials so that it actually would make clear what you need, the competency would be clear enough so that you could design materials for it that would go to, that would help somebody achieve that competency but also make it easy for somebody to certify or sort of assess that somebody actually has achieved that competency. So there's a bit of a challenge there but that can be done. And then the training providers, those that already exist, would be free to either share their materials in a way that they share modules and codes that kind of hang off that curriculum or they could, if they wanted to, they could just design their own, use that curriculum and design their own secret commercial trainings and still work towards that curriculum and then go back and influence the curriculum through curriculum patches. And then a certification provider again could use that sort of a curriculum in a way to assess somebody's competence in Drupal and build different profiles because this would not be just kind of one Drupal competence but you could build different profiles that you can, in the same, you could sort of issue badges for and things like that. And so that way we could have a community-based certification that actually the community could kind of be involved in more than just in typo three by submitting questions but actually by helping identify what the knowledge is in Drupal and the skills are and the profiles of skills. And it could be distributed because different people could use it in different ways but nevertheless be sort of maintained some compatibility around it and it would be fairly democratic because everybody could contribute back to what's happening. And then the certification provider in some way would have to earn the trust of the community or of the, of for instance, of employers and so on but it would have to work through some sort of a community system which could be informal like the guilds or it could be formal like sort of a computer assistant like the badges. So basically in a way we would have kind of a mission we could have if we adopted a system like the badges or if we just use the guilds but we would have some sort of a system of trust where they would have the community could build through the community we could people could achieve could maintain some sort of a some sort of a sort of standing regarding the fact, regarding their ability to vouch for somebody's skills. Now I, the Mozilla badge system is a very good way of I think going about it because it's using because it's using kind of a combination of the community trust and some you know they have sort of cryptographic signatures and kind of a based on the model of the web of trust so that you can sort of vouch for people in different ways and so on. So I think if we kind of broaden some of the more metaphors we can actually build this up into a broader service certification system. Now, how part of the context that we have at the moment as Heather spoke about earlier is the fact that we already have a bunch of people who provide triple training as we saw so with the raised hands earlier. So why would it, why would the people who already sell and you know my apologies if your logo is not on there. And but you know there are many people out there so why would these people who are already kind of sell training and they're quite happy with what they're doing why would they go back and sort of start working on a joint sort of a curriculum project with some sort of an open certification. Well, I think there is a lot of benefit because this would have a system where there's an open there were the education and certification is based on an open community based curriculum would actually add value to the training provides because they would say okay we are helping YouTube to achieve this particular competency profile. That is publicly available. You could offer a better progression of courses so you could say the training providers could say well this is where you start this is where you go. You could they could consult with corporations to help them to help them sort of create mix profile mix or skills mix for their for their staff and they could also if the curriculum were well designed it would be much easier to create new materials because the well designed curriculum makes it much makes it very easy to come to put together syllabus with core with different learning and teaching activities and also supporting materials and also obviously the fact that you can the certification would be more some sort of a community based certification would be sort of more broadly recognized with work together. So, and obviously the last benefit is the same as with code, you know you contribute code and you learn you get free code review you learn from others you have the benefit of working with others. So, how would be this, how would this be how why would this be good for people who are coming who are new to Drupal to sort of the new the hidden developers the people who we don't necessarily see on the forums or in the issue queues. Well, it would be easier to get in into Drupal it would be easier to create a learning program for self study so somebody could say okay I want to learn Drupal these are some of the steps I can do I can take you know some informal learning some sort of some learning through training and so on. Okay. And it would make it it would actually also provide maybe alternative route to Drupal competence rather than perhaps the certified to rock system kind of in a way catch tries to capture that informal learning but actually this could be this could be a bit more give people a few bit more guidance on how to get somewhere. And obviously it would be easier if you have a skills profile that works this way that's certified by other trusted community members it would be easier to advertise your services in order to get a job. How would this be good for the Drupal community? Well, it would be good because new members would be it would be easier from any new members to come into the community and also would be one more way of assigning trust which is becoming increasingly difficult with the size of the communities to just to do it based on who you know who you remember talking to or seeing on the forum. And how is this good for the clients? Well, let's again this my apologies. It is this is good for the clients that it's my easier hire hire employees and the get contractors for the right jobs and also it would be easier for them to create development plans for their Drupal staff so they could so they wouldn't necessarily just have to hire a Drupal developer they could get a particular staff profile. So. So after you've listened to some of these ideas we're really curious to hear and we've been watching on the ether pad there do you feel free to jump in? Is this pie in the sky? Do you think that what we're talking about is completely bonkers? Or do you sort of wonder how this could actually happen and would you like to join us in thinking about this? We'd like to go into a little bit of a discussion a practical discussion you could participate in and how would this API actually work and maybe a critical discussion. What are your swat? I know you probably love swats strength weaknesses opportunities and threats. We were planning on a little bit more time for small group discussion I'm just looking at the time here it is five, it's like four minutes to three. We have 15 minutes? Yeah we sort of do have 15 minutes. Should we break in or just take general questions? Let's have a vote so who would like we were thinking maybe just guys you know break into groups to discuss it and maybe make some notes on the ether pad or you could just take general questions so who would like to do the small group thing if you raise your hand nobody so general discussion it is. Okay so that's talking about democracy. I mean just go back to the pie in the sky so I just wanna say this could this would be a lot of work. This is a lot of stuff going on. You know I think it could work but it could easily just not work and by we've seen that the other efforts at certification and Drupal training haven't actually particularly been successful so far and I think one of the reasons is because of the diversity and complexity of the Drupal knowledge in the Drupal community and so perhaps and also because of the very strong feelings in Drupal community about everybody's ability to contribute and to have a voice. So you know so giving people a voice particularly at least at the curriculum stage and also sort of harnessing the existing models of kind of trust communication in the Drupal community could be quite powerful if we can find a way to actually just take those metaphors and those suggestions and maybe make them into something specific. We have a variety of different training partners. They could be development shops or they're companies based mainly on training and their clients are all asking about certification. Our partners are asking about certification who are development shops and not training. There have been situations for example where say a French development shop cannot get a government contract because when the question is are you certified in X software they can't tick yes and that blocks Drupal as well from getting into these other areas. So yes there are situations where certification is specifically required. There could also be staff who participate in training and they need to provide to their employer some type of certification or certificate and so whether that's something more like the Lullabot model is you participated here's your certificate of participation or whether or not employers need to trust that skill we're hearing it time and time again and of course Streets himself feels like it could be something that could really help the community. I don't know does anyone else have any sort of experience with demand for certification? I didn't get your name there. Karen if you put your name up there as well that's maybe something good to show. The answer to that was 11 weeks course someone participates and they don't want to complete it and not get something to show for it afterwards. Any other responses to that or Eric from WhizLearn? So certification Eric WhizLearn is saying that a certification of attendance or certificate of attendance is usually enough to accommodate most cases. Is anyone else saying that as well or Kate Miller chapter three? So the example is given there about a government agencies requiring some again a type of certificate of attendance being adequate. Does anyone have any other alternative reasons that Rod just said he's a grant and again agreeing Rod from OS training. Does anyone have any alternative things or who else is demanding training? Are we all really concerned only about these government agencies and completing an SOW? Finn Lewis has given an example of a type of accreditation system where someone has the ability to be an authority and an accredited certifications. Joanne you wanted to add something more to your comment earlier? Really are you sure? Okay. Can I just, oh Peter sorry to do it. Well can I basically say on that, and if you go back to the title of this, the real title of the session, how do you know this gal knows Drupal? And that's really the essential problem. And in a way, I started with the Drupal community in 2006 and I pretty much knew, I mean it was so easy to know somebody because you looked at their Drupal.org profile or you've met them probably but at the early stages. So the community was small enough that you could actually kind of have know enough about who you can trust. And but now the community is too large so we actually don't know. So the certification, even though we talked about the reasons, government contracts, employers and everything, but it actually could be as simple as, you meet someone and so it would be so nice you could go on Drupal.org and look at their profile and see those bunch of badges that they've collected based on the work they've done. So again, we didn't have time to go into any, because any of those slides that I showed could be a separate session on how you could do it, how that would work and how it wouldn't. But there could be so many ways that a system like this could not just help the training community or the training environment, it could actually help everybody in the community because you could look at people's profile and say, okay, I know what this person is about. Because at the moment just I did modules and it's just not enough what's on the Drupal.org profile. And I think because it's just so hard to get a glimpse to kind of capture people's skills and competence. It is, if you can sort of establish those sorts of trust. So you could say badges, certificates from, I don't know, somebody, company X are good. So we could, because the badges could, you could implement some sort of feedback mechanism as well. So I think you could do it, but it would just, you know, but it is, it is, yeah, sorry. The problem with the Red Hat model is that Red Hat is pretty much is a kind of a bounded system. There's only some, you know, the Linux is, there's only so many things you do with it. Whereas even though it's a lot, but it's still, whereas the Drupal, you know, as Peter was saying, there are just so many different ways you can approach a problem that are right. And then there are just so many different kind of skills profile. So it's difficult to, difficult to implement just like a single exam type, which is, if you notice type 03, for instance, are very constricted as to what they actually certify. They don't certify, you can, you know, develop for it. Yeah, what was your name again? Alex from, any word? New Zealand, he's Alex from New Zealand, okay. There is actually a module where if you have it in, if you have this module installed, name escapes me, level 10, developed it, and it will come, they actually have one site that does aggregations, like tutor.com, to UTR.com, and aggregates information. This is all tagged, and then apparently it will just suggest learning materials, screencasts, et cetera, based on the modules that you have installed. So there may be paths to that already. Diana from Four Kittens in the back. What time is your session on that? Last thing on Wednesday, pimping the session, very good. Plugging the session, I mean, sorry, too inappropriate. I just wanted to say I think that that will be a really great session to go to, and I see a few other hands we will get to. But one thing I think we started off talking about these clients and the demand and stuff. We're not thinking about that individual, that person who comes to the community, and there's this really interesting tweet that came on from, I actually don't know where the fellow was from. He was like, I don't even know where to get started. I don't even know where I'm supposed to go. And if we had that structure there, someone who's self-directed would be able to see, okay, I can follow some free node one materials, I can buy this book, I'll be able to learn about it there. And if I want to get up that curve, and I want to go up and do these really hard challenges, I can see what it's going to take to get me there. There's actually on Drupal.org, there's something called the developer profiles. They've been published two weeks ago. There's not a lot of response at the moment. I'll share the links in a moment. And they are actually two profiles, one of a, say a front-end developer, one of a sort of back-end developer. We have actually through the curriculum and training group last summer developed about five or six different roles. We really need to flesh out these roles. And it's not the skills that they need now, it's the skills they need coming before. So whether it's, you need to know PHP and CSS if you're going to do this role and you need to understand or have some experience with some type of data migration or something like that, if you're going to get this particular role. And that's sort of what I think Dominic showed, there's just this gigantic breadth of information if you're going to get up to that level. So I saw a few hands. Donna Benjamin Kim, also from New Zealand, sorry. Australia, sorry. That gets, that seems a little messy territory of like what's curriculum and what's materials. And I'll let Dominic take that part. Well, I was just, I'm a CVCRM is kind of a good exam because they have a, there's the floss manuals and they have a kind of an open source manuals. And actually they have a documentation sprint this week going on. So those on the materials, definitely. But I definitely, but also hearing the idea of having some sort of a common, common tree on which you could hang these things and that could help you develop and perhaps not waste the effort of redevelop reinventing the wheel. And I mean, again, the metaphor of the code I think is important because sometimes there are two modules that do pretty much the same thing but they're written because the author just didn't quite like the way it was done the first time. Well, this is the same thing. If it's like code, you can be forked. So you can say, well, I, this branch doesn't, I don't think this is how the skills are. So I'm just gonna fork it and offer an alternative. And again, if the sort of attendant certification system is based on, is based on some sort of a level of trust, kind of machine assisted trust, then you could then people could sort of certify. Yes, this person knows, you know, this kind of curriculum and that curriculum, but they could, you could still link it to some sort of a profile of ability. And then, you know, I think there would be a sort of a business in the sorts of consultancies that are happening all over the, all the time about who do you need to hire? Well, then you could say, you need three people with this profile and three people with this profile. And then those people, you know, and then you could just kind of look in the community who has those, you know, badges or whatever sort of certifications of trust. You have two minutes left, so one last question. I think we go back to, if you saw Dries' keynote today, he mentions this, you know, this sort of like the intake for Drupal, you know. Our intake pipe is clogged right now. We can't bring hobbyists in up to speed. If people aren't able to say, you know, I was speaking with a developer who uses Python in the daytime and in his free time he uses PHP because he likes the way it looks. He likes PHP. And so he's here, it's his first DrupalCon. He's never actually even used Drupal before. And he has a lucky opportunity to come here because he's nearby. Now, that person doesn't even know where to start. He was able to, you know, come here. What about all the people who don't have the opportunity to come here? We really have to think about, yeah, who is this for? And I think that if it's a community-based certification or talking about something that's open and available, it could make a much different landscape for that, you know, to widen that intake pipe. One last Jacob saying there. Well, in the same way as code, you know, I mean, it's, you develop in Drupal. I mean, if you ask somebody 15 years ago, is it possible to develop something like Drupal in the way that Drupal actually has been developed, they would have said, no, you're crazy. That's just not possible. And it turned out it was. So, you know, so maybe, maybe, I don't know. And I cannot say they will, but I'd say it could be possible to try it. But what I was trying to just kind of a, to conclude and come back to what you were saying, who benefits? Well, the community benefits is that, is that also everybody, well, both, because you need to, because it's, because you're learning. I mean, come on Drupal.org and you take a first step, your second step, you're doing all these things to learn more about Drupal. Well, this way, you could, there could be a system that you could get credit for it. Then you could actually leave a trace through your learning. And that would help you communicate with other people who will then see your trace. So it's, okay, this person has done all of these things. Just one second, I want to pull this back to the definitions. We're talking about a competency that we're sharing, you know, we're actually patching, you know, can install Drupal 6 and can, you know, install and, you know, configure X module. We're not talking about the screencast or the exercise or the activity that actually goes through step by step. This is how you do it. It's simply a quantifiable, accessible competency. So we're not talking about, you know, sharing all of your great, you know, proprietary commercial materials. That's not it. You know, but there are so many great free resources out there as well. And if those were, if those were tagged and easily accessible, then the value of an aggregator like tutor.com or there's one like DrupalCount27.org right now, the value of those would be increased greatly because you wouldn't just be swimming in this, you know, get this Googleitis where you're just swimming in all this material and you don't know where to start and throwing up with this, you know, just vomit of stuff that's spam-ridden and hacked and horrible. I mean, you'd be able to see, oh wait, this is relevant to my needs right now. So just keep that person in mind. I think it changes things. Does anyone want to continue this conversation? We're really pressing our luck running into the coffee break now. Who thinks this isn't pie in the sky and wants to talk about it further? Okay, there's a show about two or three hands. Excellent. So let's go meet your coffee and then go to the... We have the buff coming right after this. So just, you know, we'll just have a coffee and then meet in room... 332... Room 332 in the Croydon College. Half an hour. For half an hour after this. After the coffee break.