Certification programme overview

The QGIS certification platform is designed to provide an easy path for projects to be able to issue certification certificates. The system allows a project to approve one or more certification providers. These providers can then set up training centers and course conveners. Course conveners prepare a course and then attendees are assigned to that course. Once the course is completed, certificates get issued by the course convener in digital form. There is the opportunity to charge a fee for each certificate issued. This mechanism can be used to support the parent project.

The following diagram provides a generalised overview of the certification process from the point of view of a certifying organisation.

You may be wondering about our approach to certification. We looked at a number of approaches where we could provide a more rigorous and systematic way of certifying software users. These approaches can be split in two general approaches:

1. Computer based testing: Favoured by industry, in this approach the project owner would create a large pool of questions and then provide a test environment where a random subset of questions are allocated to the person being tested and they would carry out an online examination. There are a few issues with this approach including the need for a way to verify that the correct user actually undertook the exam and not a proxy, the need for a large amount of project input to create and maintain the test questions, and the general trend for examinees to go online and share the questions the were asked for future examinees. There is also the issue that sometimes complex (especially graphical) software is hard to examine in an environment where text based answers are expected.
2. Portfolio based testing: Favoured by academia, this approach requires attendees to submit mini-projects or other projects such as maps and reports to demonstrate their competency. This has a downside that each evaluation is very personal and subjective.

Neither of these systems is really suitable for our needs so we have opted for a third choice: In this approach we create a "web of trust". In this approach we trust the organisations that provide training to properly issue certificates for their course attendees. We spend our time verifying the certifying organisation and then trust them to 'do the right thing' after that.