The Document Foundation LibreOffice Certification Program — The Document Foundation

Certification has been traditionally associated with proprietary software vendors, although the system has been in place at FOSS vendors such as MySQL, Red Hat and SUSE for a number of years. Certification strengthens the relationship with partners, while ensuring a quality of service good enough to avoid problems for final users.
There are two distinct aspects to certification. One is to certify organizations that are recognized partners or franchisees, and the second is to certify the competence in specific areas. LibreOffice Certification has the objective of assessing the competence in areas such as LibreOffice development and L3 support, migrations to LibreOffice, LibreOffice trainings and L1/L2 support of LibreOffice.
According to The Document Foundation’s vision, certified professionals have the objective of extending the reach of the community to the corporate world, by offering CIOs and IT managers a recognition in line with proprietary offerings (in order to give them a comparable choice, not limited to software but including value-added services).
Certified professionals are supposed to become a valuable channel for deeper engagement with the corporate world, that will ultimately lead to improved customer satisfaction. In fact, by communicating with the LibreOffice community through certified professionals, organizations should be able to improve the way they leverage the advantages of free software and the features of LibreOffice, and get a better value added support.
In addition, through certified professionals, organizations should also be able to better communicate their ideas and needs to TDF, and ultimately co-operate with the LibreOffice community in order to start contributing to the development of the free office suite by engaging certified developers to fix specific bugs and regressions, or to add new features.
TDF’s challenge is to grow the project, the product and the ecosystem (the components of the “whole” product), in order to cross the chasm between the adoption of LibreOffice by innovators and early adopters and the adoption of LibreOffice by the early and late majority (a group of pragmatists who are not going to buy into a discontinuous technology unless they can reference other pragmatists, who are highly support oriented).
LibreOffice Certification is completely different from commercial certification. TDF is looking for something more than simple development, integration, project management, migration, training or technical skills. TDF is looking for LibreOffice Ambassadors, able to provide value-added professional services to grow the LibreOffice ecosystem.
In fact, certification is a key milestone for building the LibreOffice ecosystem, and increase the number of organizations capable of adding value on top of LibreOffice (and help to grow the adoption rate over proprietary office suites). Certification is also going to represent an additional opportunity for TDF, in the medium to long term, to sustain the growth of the ecosystem.
TDF ecosystem already includes all the elements of this new model of certification, in order to make it interesting for the market (i.e. individuals and companies which are not yet thinking about becoming TDF partners, but have the potential to do so). Because of this, LibreOffice Certification is open both to TDF Members and active project contributors and to organizations and individuals actively supporting LibreOffice in their local market.
Before starting to outline LibreOffice Certification Program, it should be absolutely clear that it is not supposed to become a source of competition for TDF corporate supporters, TDF partners and TDF Members who provide Value Added Services to the market. On the contrary, it represents a benchmark for the quality of the services provided by these companies, and provides a transparent criteria for evaluating the quality of the services provided by third parties. This will help build and sustain the ecosystem.
The main focus of LibreOffice Certification Program is the corporate environment. Although there might be a large request for end user certification, it is not as strategic as professional certification as it is not going to help building and growing the ecosystem.
The LibreOffice Certification Program will be overseen and coordinated by the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation, through a Certification Committee which will be reporting to the BoD as appropriate. The members of the Certification Committee will be approved by TDF’s BoD.
LibreOffice Certification recognizes the individual skills, but is neither binding The Document Foundation to their actions, nor holding it liable for their actions. There is a document in the Reference section - namely the Certification Code of Conduct - that should inspire the behaviour of Certified Professionals.
The Certification Committee has defined the Certification Pre-Requisites, which are common to all certification categories, and the Certification Criteria, which are specific to each certification category and are provided as reference protocols. For a definition of the different certification categories and the relevant criteria, see the “Individual Certifications” section below.
All candidates can access the LibreOffice Certification Program for free, provided they comply with the Certification Pre-Requisites.
In order to apply, they have to fill in the Application Form and provide the necessary information. Developers are not supposed to apply for certification, as they will be invited by the Engineering Steering Committee based on their code contributions to LibreOffice.
LibreOffice Certification can be attributed to individuals who have developed their skills by managing, coordinating, developing or contributing to LibreOffice Migration (or Large Deployment) or Training Projects, or both. To demonstrate the involvement in such projects, candidates must provide the necessary evidence with project reports or other documents such