Re: [libreoffice-marketing] Article on Datamation website: "How Microsoft Office Tops LibreOffice: 11 Features"

> Le jeudi 26 avril 2012 à 21:47 -0400, Robert Ryley a écrit :
> > This has nothing to do with agreement, but with evidence.  I did not ask
> > for a change of course.  I asked how the group decided it was competent
> to
> > judge others.
> >
> > Second, from people in the bsd community, I have data that it costs close
> > to six figures to implement a cbt with the capable vendors.
> >
> > Your nonresponsiveness about whose interest is furthered by this course
> of
> > action is disturbing.   Developers, writers, and testers who might
> > contribute now have to deal with self appointed third parties who use the
> > work, but will now imply people who don't pay up for a piece of paper,
> are
> > incompetent.

Hi Robert,

We do certification of end user competence so it is a bit different from
certificating tech suppliers but some of the principles are the same.

Certification is about confidence. What exactly is being certificated and
how do we know it is robust? You can buy degrees in the USA but are they
worth the paper they are written on?

The big problem for small under-funded groups is that building the brand
strength for confidence is not easy and building proper quality assurance
systems is both expensive and requires specific expertise. Either you throw
a lot of money at it or you take time, learn and look for other alliances
that help build confidence.

To give an idea, I first had the idea to do this in the OOo community back
around 10 years ago. We are now just getting to the systems to the point
where they are good enough. (We had to transition an IT infrastructure
business to a qualifications business with virtually no investment) Until
recently we only targeted innovator/early adopters. We got ourselves
accredited by a well-respected national government (UK) and endorsed by the
national IT sector skills council. We can show the standards we
comply<http://www.theingots.org/community/ofqualA>with directly to
customers. That took a couple of years. We applied for and
got EU funding. We now have a glowing report  <http://bit.ly/HWautu>from
the EU National Agency that helps credibility especially when dealing with
government customers.

I also realised that the user base for OOo was not big enough initially so
we now certificate end users in all IT skills. Mostly MS Office :-) That
might seem counter-intuitive but it gets us into their customer base. We
have had a number of schools switch as a result. We are now doing post
graduate management qualifications, food safety, football because there is
demand. The more we get the more likely we will have income to help support
FOSS. The Python academy is, for example interested in applying for EU
money next year for a certification programme and I'll help them as I know
how to do it.

So it has taken us best part of 10 years to develop our Drupal based
systems for managing quality assurance and probably around 1 million Euros
in investment one way and another. I don't have a particular axe to grind,
we will provide Apache OpenOffice, LibreOffice, MS Office, Google Docs,
Python, Inkscape etc certification independently, backed by the UK
government and European Qualifications Framework, working with whoever
wants to work with us. Our main limitation is lack of funding for rapid
growth so we are patient and just do it incrementally as we can afford to.

-- 
Ian

Ofqual Accredited IT Qualifications (The Schools ITQ)

www.theINGOTs.org +44 (0)1827 305940

The Learning Machine Limited, Reg Office, 36 Ashby Road, Tamworth,
Staffordshire, B79 8AQ. Reg No: 05560797, Registered in England and
Wales.

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