Open Training

Nick McKenna — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:14:24 GMT

I had an idea a few days ago that I have been mulling over. I was talking to some colleagues today about it and I got some positive feedback. The idea is to provide free, open, technical training to anyone who wants it.

The inspirations for this idea are the Open Source community and BSAC scuba diving. It struck me that as techies we contribute time to open source projects that we believe in. BSAC provide free scuba diving training to anyone who wants it. I think it would be a good idea to put those two ideas together.

The plan would be to create an organisation that ran free technical training sessions with volunteer trainers. The mission statement would be something like "To ensure that the UK IT workforce becomes and remains the world's most skilled IT workforce".

The organisation would organise and manage all kinds of training events from short half day sessions to week-long marathons which were staffed by volunteers. Attendees on the courses would be expected to contribute by teaching at some point in the future. We could consider some sort of training credit scheme, but I would prefer to keep things less constrained to begin with. People completing courses successfully would get certified by the organisation. There are other ways in which people could contribute too. We would need to co-ordinate events and run a web site with a calendar on it, for example.

Ideally I would like trainers to make their training materials open for public use, but I don't think we would insist on it.

Any thoughts?

Java

Open Training