*We are outlining this as we go - consider this a very rough draft*
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*Note: These are very loose guidelines which need to be clarified [(see issue)](/node/221)*
* Open Source - All materials provided as deliverables must be available under a free distribution license (e.g., GPL, Creative Commons, BSD, etc.) and contributed back to the Drupal community.
* Open Source - All materials provided as deliverables must be available under a free distribution license (e.g., GPL, Creative Commons, BSD, etc.) and contributed back to the Drupal community.
This person installs and configures modules to create site features. They will be knowledgeable about theming and development, but will mostly use the Drupal through use of the administrative interface.
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This person installs and configures modules to create site features. They will be knowledgeable about theming and development, but will mostly use Drupal through its administrative interface.
Learning, Mentoring, Training, and Education groups
Drupal Kata - The Drupal Kata is a program that provides training in a wide range of areas ranging from site planning, drafting proposals, project management, information architecture, development, design, infrastructure, to Drupal workflows and community. It does this by pairing apprentices with a mentor or mentors, thus gaining exposure to real-world scenarios and connections with the local and global community.
Curriculum and Training - This is a group to organize and discuss the development of Drupal courseware to be used for training students at Drupal Camp and other training events.
Drupal Dojo - The Drupal Dojo was created for apprentice/journeyman developers who want to increase proficiency, and for experts looking to grow the pool of Drupal talent.
DROP - DROP is a program dedicated to helping people find easy, short-term ways of making valuable contributions to Drupal, as well as helping them become a part of the Drupal community.
Drupal in Education - This group is an umbrella group for supporting and discussing the various uses of Drupal in educational settings.
Google Summer of Code - 2010 edition of the program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects.
Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP) - initiative to get pre-university students involved in open source software development. The contest brought together more than 350 students from around the world to help ten Open Source projects make improvements to their code base, marketing materials, documentation and user experience research.
* Develop open source curriculum ready to use by anyone for delivery of hands-on training;
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The underlying goal of this working group is to develop a Curriculum Framework for Drupal Learning. To reach this goal we will:
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* Create a more effective platform to provide free online training, mentoring, and a showcase for Drupal;
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* Discover and recruit new talent;
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* Facilitate production of an open source Drupal curriculum including guidelines, best practices, lesson plans, activities and self-paced learning programs, ready to use by anyone for delivery of hands-on training
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* Help end-users to evaluate a specialist by providing standard "levels of expertise";
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* Organize learning content, lessons and courses by facilitating the mapping of roles to [competencies](http://drupalkata.com/node/702) to taxonomy terms and developing cataloging and management tools, as well as an authoritative vocabulary reference, storage and distribution systems.
A useful/good curriculum will have the following properties (sort of a unit test for the curriculum):
make it easy to identify how real skills, abilities, experiences successful individuals have relate to individual curriculum items
make it easy to design training programs, as well as individual lessons and tutorials (independent of instructional design)
make it easy to create learning materials and learning experiences that relate to individual competencies
make it easy to assess learners'/candidates' skill level both as achievement (part of a course of study) and competence (independent of a course of study)
help learners/candidates to assess their progress, set learning goals, evaluate the suitability of training programs, etc.
make it easy for potential end-users: i.e. employers and job candidates to communicate skills needed and skills available (and/or need for additional training)
make it possible for co-opeting training providers to offer training experiences and materials with comparable outcomes
This may seem rather obvious but in my experience these considerations are very often neglected.
What could then be some of the specific characteristics of the Drupal curriculum?
open and community-maintained
competency-based, focusing on outcomes measurable through a combination of portfolio evaluation and testing
inclusive of 'soft' skills - such as navigating the community, using the Drupal support system, etc.
The big questions to solve:
how would such a curriculum be maintained - centrally or as a collection of branches?
what would be the format of the curriculum - database/RDF ontologies?
how can communication of basic concepts and principles be maintained given that many people have different intuitive understanding of the terms being used (curriculum, syllabus, training, skills, competencies, etc.) - perhaps focusing on 'competencies' as the least controversial term might help
