Thank you to all those that replied to my message of concern about the, to me, lack of distinction between theINGOTS and an OpenOffice.org community accreditation scheme for education courses in OpenOffice.org.
My apologies that my email was not sufficiently clear on a number of points, I hope to remedy that lack of clarity in this email. I am in full support of the concept of a community-based accreditation scheme for courses in OpenOffice.org to be able to offer certification of skill levels in a similar way to Microsoft Office User Specialist, and the idea of starting at an entry level is a good one. The problem, to me, is that, as far as I know, we don't have a community based scheme. Thus, as theINGOTS is the first accreditation scheme, it has become the defacto standard and, in my opinion, we are in danger of having a private monopoly on accreditation of OpenOffice.org courses. Therefore I propose that an accreditation process that is community- based be put together. I will do what I can to support such a process. I am not opposed to people making money from OpenOffice.org. I do not, for example, oppose Platinum Pro. To me there is nothing wrong with people charging for their services. I do, however, have a problem with a company gaining political, and commercial standing on the strength of others' work - in this case the OpenOffice.org community. As the "Education Lead for the OpenOffice.org community worldwide" (quoted from http://www.irlcomputers.com/ingots/content.php?page=faq#q3), it is my opinion, that Ian Lynch is putting his commercial interest ahead of the good of the community. I was recently made the OpenOffice.org contact person for the South Island of New Zealand. I see part of this role as getting OpenOffice.org to be used throughout the New Zealand education system. And thus I have had an interest in investigating theINGOTs programme. I met with Ian Lynch at the conference in Canberra, just a couple of days ago, and he lent me a copy of the material about theINGOTS (http://www.irlcomputers.com/ingots/guides/handbook1104.pdf). In the footer of each page was a copyright notice, and I did not notice a statement in the document that the copyright was in the nature of a creative commons copyright. My interpretation was that all rights are reserved. It is possible that I am going blind, but I cannot see a creative commons copyright notice on the website (http://www.irlcomputers.com/ingots/). In my experience, the usual place is in the footer or side bar of each page. If the document that I read is an IT educationalist's first contact with OpenOffice.org, then, in my opinion, the impression that OpenOffice.org would make would be less than positive. Any person using OpenOffice.org apparently would not be able to produce a document with both portrait and landscape pages with the left and right margins appropriately mirrored (but this is not true). Other problems in the document include numerous punctuation inconsistencies and repeated words. The lack of distinction between theINGOTS and the OpenOffice.org community (which I did not perceive initially and it is possible that others will not have perceived the distinction either), this document is doing more harm to OpenOffice.org's reputation than good. As I understand it, one of the requirements of open source software is that the source code must be made available. The equivalent, to me, in this case would be that the document (The INGOTS.org handbook) should be available in an editable form. I have not been able to find this document in an editable form. Further, on suggesting to Ian Lynch that the document needed improving, I received comments like "you are the first person to make negative comments" rather than "what do you suggest?" or "could you proof read and update the document?". Now I would like to shift the focus a little. My apologies for not introducing myself more formally to this particular mail list. I will rectify that now. My educational experience: -------------------------- * Qualified secondary teacher - taught Computing, Mathematics and Horticulture. * In charge of computing at two polytechnics (tertiary technical institutes). * Reorganised the computing courses for all New Zealand polytechnics so that there were vertical channels through the various certificate and diploma programmes. * Have relief lectured in computing at a university. * Taught teachers of a private company in Malaysia that specialised in computing education for Chinese primary school children. * Been in charge of the IT training in a research organisation with over 1000 employees. My OpenOffice.org work: ----------------------- Independently wrote the Migration Guide on how to migrate to OpenOffice.org, mainly from Microsoft Office. Joined OOoAuthors, where the document, in true open source style, has been improved through community effort, and parts of the document formed the basis for chapters in other areas. Have proof read and tried to generally assist in the OOoAuthors project. While writing the Migration Guide, I identified a number of macros that would ease users' migration, and so I have been busy writing those macros. The macros are available from: http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/hillview/OOo/ I, like others, have been concerned about the, to me, slow development of OpenOffice.org. A potential solution to this problem is through the writing of macros and components. Learning how to do this is, in my opinion, more realistic for more people than how to change the core OpenOffice.org code. However, I found the learning curve to be quite steep. To try to make this learning curve less steep, I have put together the basis of a wiki on the subject: http://ext.openoffice.org.nz. I wanted enough information in the wiki from the start so that people would see it as a valuable resource and want to contribute to it. This took a considerable amount of effort. I have been active on various mail lists and oooforums - username Iannz. Last week I gave 5 presentations at the LCA 2005 OpenOffice.org miniconf in Canberra Australia. Transport, accommodation and registration fees all came out of my own pocket. I have installed and maintained FOSS systems for a co-lead of one of our political parties and their researcher - for no personal financial gain. Recently I was given the responsibility of OpenOffice.org contact person for the South Island of New Zealand. I have been busy getting organised for this new role. For example, in 16 days time, I will be giving a presentation to the local Linux Users Group with the aim of getting more people involved in promoting OpenOffice.org. To have the time to do this OpenOffice.org work, and other projects that I believe in, I have been living off savings and the goodwill of my partner. If I were to put a dollar figure on my input to OpenOffice.org, it would be at least $150,000. While the NZ$ is low in exchange rate my experience is that one NZ dollar buys about the same as a UK pound or a US dollar in the respective countries. Thanks, Ian Laurenson --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
