================================================ Linux Professional Institute News - 14 July 1999 ================================================ I. Executive Summary II. News Summary III. News IV. List Topics V. Links ================================================ I. Executive Summary Development of the certification program continues with recent efforts focused on finishing the objectives for the distribution specific exams and interviewing candidates for item review. The Steering Committee has been working on formal incorporation as a non-profit and obtaining financial support for our efforts. SuSE and IBM have pledged support which will help accelerate the item submission process. The are a number of ways to contribute to the certification process; see the News section for details. A German language "chapter" of LPI is being formed with both a web site and a mailing list currently available. Dan York and Evan Leibovitch are at Comdex Canada. ================================================ II. News Summary A. Status Update B. How Can I Help? C. German Chapter Forming D. Dan York's _Linux Journal_ Article E. Distribution Specific Objectives are Up F. New Archives are On-Line G. Recent Web Site Problems H. Open Source Forum Report I. Dan and Evan at Comdex Canada ================================================ III. News A. Status Update -- So where are we in the certification process? A lot has been happening recently, both in the Steering Committee and on the public lists. l-c-program has been very busy working out the final objectives for the distribution specific exams, discussing the issues of jargon, recertification and test revisions, and building a glossary of commonly used acronyms. The Steering Committee has also been very busy working on the formal incorporation of LPI (pending), reviewing the contracts with VUE (pending incorporation), and actively recruiting financial supporters for our organization. Scott has interviewed item reviewers and is ready to start accepting items as soon as we can finalize some financial details. The good news is that both IBM and SuSE have pledged to come through with funding so we should be able to get rolling on item collection soon! Keep an eye on the lists and the web page. B. How Can I Help? -- The are a ton of great opportunities to help in getting our certification program out the door. If you caught the last news release, you'll notice that there have been a couple of additions to the task list. In particular, the first three entries are new and have a high priority right now. We have been drafting a glossary of concepts, preferred terms, jargon and acronyms that candidates are supposed to know about and that may be used in the development of the LPI program objectives and test items. The current list, which is work in progress, has been drafted by Alan Mead and is on-line at: http://conan.ipat.com/~cert/lpilist.html We need volunteers for these tasks: 1) Help Alan Mead finish the list. Contact him at: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 2) Check the test objectives currently on-line at: http://www.lpi.org/cgi-bin/poms.py against the list of preferred terms (once that is finalized), and signal the cases where the current objectives do not conform. The text should be updated by the topic maintainers. Please contact Tom Peters <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> about this. 3) Once the objectives have been made consistent, extract the test objectives and related material from POMS and put them in one page for each exam, in a pretty format and structure. Chuck Mead has made preliminary pages which are on-line at: ftp://server.moongroup.com/pub/lpi/ but they need work to make them better readable. Please contact Tom Peters <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> about this. 4) Very shortly, Scott Murray, our director of exam development, will be putting out a call for "item writers" to write questions for our first level exams. Item writers will receive some instruction in the types of questions we are seeking and then will write items that will be submitted to an extensive technical review and evaluation process. If you have ever had concerns that people who completed other certification programs weren't really qualified, then please join with us and help make sure our program is of the appropriate quality. Please contact Scott Murray ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) now if you would be interested in being an item writer when we begin the process. 5) Creating a high-quality certification program such as this costs a significant amount of money. We recently unveiled our sponsorship program for both businesses and individuals at: http://www.lpi.org/sponsorship.html We've already had several major sponsors come on board (Caldera Systems, Linuxcare and SuSE are the largest) and we are actively speaking with others. If either your company or you individually would be interested in donating, we would certainly be interested to talk to you. If you think your company might be interested, but are uncomfortable bringing the matter up, please feel free to contact us and we'll be glad to make the approach. Please direct all sponsorship inquiries to either Dan York ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) or Chuck Mead ([EMAIL PROTECTED]). Please note that while we are incorporating as a nonprofit corporation, we are not (yet, anyway) a "tax-exempt" entity by U.S. IRS tax guidelines. Donations to LPI are *not* tax-deductible in the U.S. as charitable contributions. (But there may be other ways to deduct such contributions - contact an accountant for details - and hey, it's for a good cause anyway!) 6) Discussion of a courseware approval policy has been ongoing in the l-c-corprel list. The debate has died down in the past few days, but we need your input on this subject. Basically, a number of vendors have asked about an approval program for their training and education materials. LPI is trying to determine what, if anything, we should do about these requests. Check out the archives at: http://lists.linuxcare.com/linux-cert-corprel/threads.html and make your opinion known. The Corporate Relations committee will be working on a proposal to send to the Board. 7) With so many information technology publications out there - both in print and on the web, it's next-to-impossible to stay up-to-date on what's being said all over the place about Linux certification. We'd like your help. When you see an article (either in print or online) about Linux certification, can you please send us the info (article title, publication, date, URL if on the web). Either send it directly to "linux-cert-pr" if you are a member of that list (if not, consider joining!) or email it to Evan ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) You can see the list of what has been posted at: http://lists.linuxcare.com/linux-cert-pr/threads.html Messages sent to linux-cert-pr appear on the archive within an hour. 8) To date, much of the writing and speaking about LPI and our efforts to create a Linux certification program has been by members of the Steering Committee such as Evan and Dan. But please know that we are not at all exclusive about that and would encourage others to help out with writing and/or speaking about LPI and Linux certification. Many web sites are looking for people to write articles and we'd love to see more articles out there about Linux certification and LPI. If you know of a site looking for articles, please go ahead and write one. We'll be glad to provide some information or assistance if you need it. Also, if you'd like to write articles, drop us a note and we may be able to steer you to places where they are looking for writers (usually the online sites are looking for writers who will write for free). Print publications are good, too. For instance, Dan had an article in the June ";login:" published by USENIX and then an article in the July "Linux Journal." Scott Murray & Alan Mead are planning to submit an article on their survey process to a psychometrics journal. Articles might be appropriate for local or regional newsletters for training organizations, user groups, etc. Also, if you're interested in speaking to local groups, we will soon be making some presentations available online (in Applixware format so far, probably HTML, too) that you could use. For instance, Faber Fedor recently spoke to a local association of technical educators in his state. If you are interested in writing or speaking, please feel free to contact either Evan ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) or Dan ([EMAIL PROTECTED]). Feel free, too, to go ahead and just write... we'll be glad to look over articles if you'd like us to. 9) As always, one of the best ways to participate is by hopping on the mailing lists and making your expertise available to the groups. LPI is a community based organization and we need the input and the support of a wide variety of Linux users to meet our goal of creating a strong, vendor-neutral certification program. Visit us and find out how to get in the loop! http://www.lpi.org/involved.html C. As Dan mentioned in our previous posts, there was great enthusiasm building for the creation of a German language "chapter" of LPI. Thanks to the hard work of Mark Semmler, Jürgen Off, and many others, there is now a web site up at: http://www.de.lpi.org and a mailing list has been established also. Check out the web page for instructions on signing up for the list if you speak German. The first meeting was held at Linux Tag '99 at the University of Kaiserslautern and had about 34 participants. The next meeting is scheduled for Sunday, 18 Jul 99 in Berlin. D. Dan York, formerly editor of this fine newsletter, had an article published in the July 1999 issue of _Linux Journal_. Dan's article, "Building a Linux Certification Program" covers the history of LPI and the rationale behind creating a certification program for Linux. Additionally, Dan's story also covers the proposed basics of the LPI effort. It's a great starting point for people just getting involved in LPI. Dan has also written other articles for the Linux Gazette; I've included the links at the bottom of this letter. E. The objectives for the distribution specific exams are up on the web site at: http://www.lpi.org/cgi-bin/poms.py#exams Please stop by and comment on the objectives for the distributions you're familiar with. The distribution specific exams are a very important part of completing the Level 1 certification. If you've got any specialized knowledge of the various distributions, make a point to stop by and comment. F. Additional email archives are now on-line; check them out at: linux-cert: http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-cert%40linuxcare.com/ linux-cert-program: http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-cert-program%40linuxcare.com/ linux-cert-corprel: http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-cert-corprel%40linuxcare.com/ linux-cert-pr http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-cert-pr%40linuxcare.com/ The other lists (-examdev and -admin) will have archives there as well as soon as there is traffic to those lists. Many thanks to Matthew Rice for his suggestion. G. As many of you probably noticed, we had problems with our web site last week. This was due to a problem with our DNS entry for lpi.org and has been fixed. We apologize for the inconvenience. H. Ziff Davis held their Open Source Forum in Austin last week to explore Linux in the enterprise. Besides having a lot of great speakers, LPI got several good plugs during the presentations. Thanks to a late cancellation, Evan got to chair a discussion panel and I got to sit in on the discussion about standardization. Overall, LPI and the idea of certification were well received. I. As I mentioned in the executive summary, Dan and Evan will be attending Comdex Canada. If you are going to be at Comdex Canada this week in Toronto, Ontario, stop by one of our presentations and speak with Evan Leibovitch and Dan York. LPI presentations will be at 4:30pm on both Wednesday and Thursday at the Linux Pavilion Theatre. More information about speakers can be found at: http://www.linux.ca/comdex/speakers.html Please come and tell us what you think about LPI's progress. You can also contact Evan ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) or Dan ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) via email. ================================================ IV. List Topics Here's a brief overview of the topics being discussed on the various mailing lists. See something you're interested in? Check out the archives at: http://lists.linuxcare.com for more information. l-c o DNS Problems o German Chapter of LPI l-c-corprel o Accreditation or LPI Approved Courseware l-c-pr o PR Ideas for Test Rollouts l-c-program o Concensus Point VIII : Jargon o Draft Dictionary/Glossary o SAIR Tests are Up o Distro Differences/Objectives o Question of Recertification o Completed Objectives on Web o Question of Exam Expiration ================================================ V. Links LPI Home http://www.lpi.org LPI (German) Home http://www.de.lpi.org Mailing Lists Archives http://lists.linuxcare.com/ Dan's Other Cert Articles: http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue33/york.html http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue34/york.html http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue35/york.html http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue37/york.html http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue39/york.html http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue43/york.html Other Linux Certification Programs: (SAIR) http://www.linuxcertification.com/ http://www.digitalmetrics.com/ http://www.redhat.com/corp/products_training.html http://www.enterprisecertified.com/aboutecc.htm Additional email archives are now on-line: linux-cert: http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-cert%40linuxcare.com/ linux-cert-program: http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-cert-program%40linuxcare.com/ linux-cert-corprel: http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-cert-corprel%40linuxcare.com/ linux-cert-pr http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-cert-pr%40linuxcare.com/ ================================================ Corrections, Additions, Comments? Send them to: Jared Buckley [EMAIL PROTECTED] ================================================ ________________________________________________________________________ This message was sent by the linux-cert mailing list. To unsubscribe: echo unsubscribe | mail -s '' [EMAIL PROTECTED]