Here are some of the comments I shared with France Baril a few
months ago:
Certification is usually a money-making venture for a
professional organization. It requires a lot of time, development of a codified
body of knowledge (BOK), an infrastructure to develop testing materials, an
infrastructure to administer tests (or contract with someone to provide testing
services) and evaluate member’s portfolios/work records/whatever. As such, I
think it is a very poor fit for an organization like OASIS. I also think that
the DITA community is anywhere being large or established enough to support
such an effort.
I *do* sympathize profoundly with the impulse behind
France’s proposal. It’d be lovely to have some way to separate out
knowledgeable DITA peoples from wannabes. Last week I conducted a courtesy interview
for colleagues of a technical writer whose resume listed “Can train staff in
DML and DITA authoring techniques” as a qualification, despite having no
experience ever using DITA in a production environment. And I’m developing an
informal inventory to assess where writers are at vis-à-vis their knowledge of
DITA …
I just don’t see professional DITA certification as a viable
OASIS activity.
Best
regards,
Kris
Kristen
James Eberlein l DITA Architect and Technical
Specialist l SDL Structured Content Technologies Division l (t) + 1
(919) 682-2290 l keberlein@sdl.com
Please
consider the environment before printing this e-mail
From: Gershon Joseph
(gerjosep) [mailto:gerjosep@cisco.com]
Sent: Monday, November 08, 2010 9:17 AM
To: DITA Adoption TC
Subject: [dita-adoption] Proposal to form a TC for professional DITA
certificaton
France Baril is floating the idea of DITA certification. This
would be professional certification, not tools certification. Their draft
charter is attached to the message I'm forwarding.
I'll put this up for discussion at our meeting today, but deeper
discussion will be at our next meeting after folks have had time to digest this
some more.
Cheers,
Gershon
From: France Baril
[mailto:france.baril@architextus.com]
Sent: Monday, November 08, 2010 8:15 AM
To: donday@learningbywrote.com; mpriestl@ca.ibm.com; Gershon Joseph
(gerjosep); keberlein@sdl.com; joann.hackos@comtech-serv.com;
mary.mcrae@oasis-open.org; rmraya@maxprograms.com
Subject: Re: I would like to offer some of my time to the DITA TC
Hi,
At the beginning of the season, I have presented the idea of
a DITA Certification. I have had all kinds of feedback, including one from
OASIS who proposed that this might be better handled as a separate TC.
One of the main issue was with vendors addressing different
needs and having tools that might not need to measure up against all DITA
architectural features in order to serve their clients well. It should be clear
that the purpose of the certification that I am proposing is not to certify
products, but to develop and certify professional knowledge and skills of
writers, information architects, project managers of information development
teams, and developers who together form the new information development
teams.
Here is a draft for a charter. Can you please distribute it
within your committees and let people know that they can contact me for
comments and/or if they are interested in participating to such a committee.
Regards,
France