Re: RFC: a new try for an official community approved certification

On Thu, Jun 1, 2023 at 5:04 PM Jaime Casanova
<jcasanov(at)systemguards(dot)com(dot)ec> wrote:
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> At PgCon I mentioned a was going to create this thread so here we go:
>
[...]
>
> There are a lot of open questions yet, like where the exams will be
> taken. In the community infrastructure? in the company's?
>
> but I guess we have still enough for start commenting.
>

Hi everyone,

Thanks for your comments. Mine was a long trip to return to Ecuador
and then I had a lot of pending things to do.

First, let me mention the good ideas I read on this thread:

- Gunnar and Chris suggested that we could ask a NPO that is already
successfully doing a cert, namely LPI. Do any of you have a contact
there to ask this?
- Katherine mentioned something that is what I had in mind and maybe
didn't express it correctly. The idea is that companies doing training
work together for this to happen.

When I said "community developed" I certainly wasn't thinking of any
person to be involved. We should have a closed group, the development
of the cert should be done through a system and we need a process to
give credentials to anyone that will be involved. For putting
companies on the professional services we follow a process outlined
here https://www.postgresql.org/about/policies/services-and-hosting/
we could have something similar for this.

Now, some of the questions:

> 1) Who oversees all of the above?

while I spoke of teachers developing the questions and validating them
(and that could be a medium-size group), we could have a small group
of well-known community members (not necessarily teachers) that could
act as a committee for administrative actions.

> 2) How are the questions and answers developed without leaking the information out to test takers?

My idea is to have a system, very similar to the one for adding
professional services or news or whatever. Of course, that system
publishes after validation, something we don't want to happen with
this. Not everyone has access to that system.

> 3) Does core mean just the community Postgres?

Yes. I really think that it is not correct to say that you cannot
certify because you know how to use repmgr instead of patroni or
pg_auto_failover, and we cannot force everyone to know all the tools.
Every company developing a tool could decide to create their own certs
about their tools.

--
Jaime Casanova
Director de Servicios Profesionales
SYSTEMGUARDS - Consultores de PostgreSQL