Hi all,This is a great idea and I would love to see it take shape!What is at stake is to agree on courseware &examining body.Thx -- Judy Ann Okite, +254-721237507,+254-734252336 P.O. BOX 2228 00100, NAIROBI,KENYA. "May I be granted.... .....the serenity to accept the pages, I Should not edit..... ...the courage to edit the pages that ,I should..... and the wisdom to know the difference." The Wiki prayer On 1/15/08, Janet Hawtin <lucychili@gmail.com> wrote:

On Jan 16, 2008 6:31 AM, Pia Waugh <greebo@pipka.org> wrote:

...

Hi all,

I was perusing through sfd-discuss and re-found this and I wanted to renew the discussion.

<quote who="Steve Olive">

...

It is up to us, the Open Source and Free Software Communities, to encourage the use of qualifications that do not focus on a particular brand of software. I also believe that these qualifications should not be prohibitively priced, preventing students, who are often unemployed, from taking the tests. They are better served spending the money on computers and other hardware for use at home so they can better their skills and find employment.

Is this something the Software Freedom Day should look into? Registering or certifying skills with software promoted on Software Freedom Day.

Steve, what exactly do you have in mind here? We could certainly add something to the registration process or there is also the possibility of aligning with certifications and encouraging teams to do certification workshops and exams as part of their Software Freedom Day celebrations which would both draw attention to certifications and also get more qualified FOSS practitioners into the workforce every year. What do you think?

The ingots competencies are agnostic. http://theingots.org/ Robyn Manning and Kylie Willison currently use them in South Australia

There is also someone doing training in Mount Gambier and Noven has done training with his network development in Copley.

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On Wed, 2008-01-16 at 08:09 +1100, Pia Waugh wrote:

Hi Judy,

<quote who="Judy Okite">

...

Hi all,This is a great idea and I would love to see it take shape!What is at stake is to agree on courseware &examining body.Thx

It doesn't need to be any _one_ courseware examining body. I think if we encouraged training and certs in general and perhaps create a list of appropriate ones and leave it up to the very capable individual teams to decide what is best for them. A short list of the top of my head:

General computer use training: - INGOTS

Technical training: - LPI (Linux Professional Institute - vendor neutral) - RHCE (Red Hat) - NCLE (Suse training)

What else?

Here in the UK, the ingots are being actively used by some members of the Open-Source Consortium (http://www.opensourceconsortium.org/) and we have spoken about possibly developing an "access" course (think of it as LPI 0.5) to help people get into open-source. I am a keen believer in teaching a skills set, not an application, and it is with this in mind that we are gearing ourselves to team up with organisations around the world that share our beliefs about FLOSS to further the adoption of FLOSS in schools. I've just written a blog post about the fact that the Gov. IT advisor for schools has just released a report saying that vista and office 2007 are not fit for purpose (it's at http://www.truthisfreedom.org.uk/) and that open-source should be considered as an alternative where appropriate. Is there a way in which the OSC and SFD could help each other out on this one? M. -- Matthew Macdonald-Wallace matthew@truthisfreedom.org.uk Please use ISO Approved file formats (.odt/.ods/.odp/.odg/.pdf) for attachments. If you wish to convert legacy Microsoft documents to these formats, please use Open Office (http://www.openoffice.org/)