Re: Can we do something now?
(I know that I'm late...)
Lalo Martins wrote:
> About one year ago, Jim Pick came very near to putting together
> what he called "dconsult", an international body of Debian
> consultants. In the end it didn't work, but of course it was a
> great idea. Don't you think we have enought momentum now to do
> that? Is anyone interested?
>
> I'm thinking not only of consulting, but also training. I
> thought of a name like "Debian Professional Consulting and
> Education Collective".
>
> I propose we start with a website; this website would have a
> public portion where it advertises Debian and the Collective,
> explains what the Collective is and how it works, and has a
> database of members with contact information and pricing (the
> availability of pricing info would be a requirement for
> membership, as Jim Pick suggested last year and most people
> agreed - including me).
>
> The private portion of the website would have a knowledge base
> maintained by all members, together with some rules for qa. I
> think, in time, those items from the knowledge base which are
> most used and/or most easily comprehensible by non-techies could
> be distilled into a public version of the knowledge base and
> even into the Debian FAQ.
I would rather like to establish a general Debian Support Database
(DSDB). I don't think that the F-O-M can handle this but it
could be used as basis. I don't think this knowledge base or
DSDB should be restricted to be maintained by the consultants
but by the developers and an additional set - e.g. consultants.
QA is a completely different issue - it should be discussed on
debian-qa btw. Debian urgently needs QA, imho. Unfortunately
the people who brougt it up some years ago (2.5 iirc) got too
much involved with other stuff or kicket out so they didn't
continue to work on this.
> In this initial stage, it would work mostly for the following
> goals/methods:
>
> 1: a kind of self-appointed certification authority for
> Debian-related consulting and education services - both
> professionals and compaines. We'd have to set very strong and
> understandable rules for this certification, and then make
> these rules available in the public website. Also, would
> certification be equivalent to membership? Or perhaps, only
> certified members would be listed in the contacts database,
> which would give the others a sort of "in experience" status?
Certification cannot be equivalent to membership since certification
would need some tests, checks etc. However membership could
depend on certification.
But: I don't like such certification at all. What are the benefits?
What about people who don't get the certification for whatever reason
but are good consultant? What about maintainers that fail?
> 3: the development of an "official" Debian learning program, so
> that certified Debian Collective teachers around the world
> teach the basics in more or less the same, interchangeable
> way; the most topics are covered by these programs (probably
> more than one - one "basic" plus many specialized), the
> better for all (including customers)
I like the idea of providing a genereal Debian Trainee Program.
> 4: a central advertising force for members, of course
What's that? (Sorry, I don't understand that due to my non-native
englishness.)
Regards,
Joey
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