Hi, I'd like to start a discussion around establishing a project (or Central Service) at the ASF to host and develop training and related materials for ASF (and possibly others, where it makes sense) projects.
I'm a committer and contributor to a few projects and make money doing consulting work. Naturally people do contact us for training, and we have developed our own slideware etc. but we find it incredibly hard work to keep those up-to-date. We also work with lots of other companies and they all face the same challenges. At the same time, we do not believe that a slide-deck is worth that much on its own (others disagree, as we used to). We believe the instructor is the real selling-point and especially when that person is deeply embedded in the projects itself as a committer or PMC. So, we as a company[0] would like to donate our slide decks and other resources we have and establish an ASF wide training project in the hopes that we as a community can collaborate on those resources. We are currently talking to partners to assess whether they are interested in joining us in open sourcing their material. I'm not sure if this is a "Central Services" kind of thing or if it should be an Incubator project to begin with. I'm posting this here because I think there are good arguments for it being a project (e.g. it appears as a “project” in all lists that others can contribute to, it follows a familiar structure etc.). It might be a bit different than other projects though (e.g. maybe there are no real releases?). This is also not limited to just slides obviously but also accompanying code and potentially other media forms. One concern I have is that the material should be as objective as possible, but our clients especially value our (often subjective) input on the matureness of tools (third-party as well as ASF), processes and communities. So, we usually include that in our slides. I guess anyone using this material would need to customize it. This is how I see it but I'm happy to change based on feedback. In scope: * Develop shared material that can be used for trainings * Develop “labs” or “hands-on” exercises * Develop or document an infrastructure that can be used for those labs * Potentially develop tools to manage the material (e.g. ideally a slide repository that contains “modules” that can be easily reused and combined) Out of scope (for now at least) * Something like what the CNCF has with their “Kubernetes Training Program”[1] with certified training partners * Project documentation I wasn’t sure whether to start this discussion in members@ and/or here or somewhere else entirely. But as we believe it should be a “project” I think this is the best place for it. I’m happy to cross-post if you think it worthwhile. I'm looking forward to any and all feedback you might have on this. I would be happy to draw up a formal Incubator Proposal once we agree on a result and shape. Anticipated FAQs: Q: Shouldn’t each project take care of its own training? A: Yes and no. Ideally a project should be well documented but developing material for professional “training” is quite different from writing documentation in my experience. I think it's better to have a single central project doing this than having this as part of every project itself. One reason being that it makes sense to have cross-project trainings (e.g. no one is interested in an “Apache Hadoop” training. They all want to learn about the ecosystem). Q: Isn't the ASF all about code, now you want to do PPT! A: We’ve had committers for documentation for a long time and I’d actually like to see much more of that in the future. I think it’s not about the code but about merit. We have a lot of Apache Way presentations now (which could be part of this project) that go into depth on this one. Q: We have the Community project[2], should this not be part of that project? A: I honestly don’t know. There is definitely some overlap or alignment but from all I’ve seen and read I think these could very well be two distinct projects but “we” could follow a very similar structure and probably reuse some content and tools. Q: I don't like PPT/keynote/Apache OpenOffice/HTML slides/... everyone should do PechaKucha at all times. A: We are not set on any format for the content, finding a suitable format will be part of this project’s mission. To me this is a technical discussion like it happens a hundred times a day on the Apache Jira and Mailing Lists. There will be disagreement and some people will be disappointed by some of the choices made but that’s no different than any other project. Q: How can I integrate slides from this project to match my corporate design? I'm not allowed to not use CD. A: Another technical question (plus probably one that involves legal@) to which I do not yet have an answer. Thank you Bernd Fondermann, Sönke Liebau and Tim Robertson for the review of this mail. Cheers, Lars [0] <https://www.opencore.com/> [1] <https://www.cncf.io/certification/training/> [2] <https://community.apache.org/>