Purpose

The purpose of the Training project is to create high-quality training material for various projects in an open source form. Up until now everyone who wants to offer a Training course for one of the Apache projects needs to create her or his own slides/labs and keep them up-to-date. This is a significant investment of time and money. This project aims to spread that burden and help all Apache projects as we can create shared resources and we can also create cross-project trainings.

To sum up, the main goals for this project:

  • Develop shared material that can be used for trainings
    • Cross-project
    • Focused on Apache but also 3rd party projects where it makes sense
  • Develop “labs” or “hands-on” exercises
  • Develop or document an infrastructure that can be used for those labs
  • Potentially develop tools to manage the material (e.g. a “slide” repository that contains “modules” that can be easily reused and combined)

These are non-goals for this project:

  • Some kind of official “Apache Training Program” with certifications etc.
    • Based on feedback and future developments this may change but we believe it’s out of scope initially
  • Project documentation

The training material we develop is not necessarily self-explanatory. It still benefits from an experienced instructor but it will make it possible for talented people without the time and resources to develop material to still train others.

Rationale

There are tons of companies offering training for and around the Apache ecosystem. From our experience everyone is building a very similar set of slides and labs (there’s only so many ways you can explain a concept). This project aims to create and use synergies. By also bringing these resources closer to their origin we hope to improve quality, freshness of the content and versatility (e.g. more language options).

It is the mission of the Apache foundation “to provide software for the public good” and we believe this project can help with that mission by making the software more accessible for a broader audience.

Timeline

Current Status

This is a bootstrapped project. While there is some initial material to contribute there are no processes, no community and no decisions yet. We are currently in the process of ramping up, hence currently a lot of time is spent with administrative tasks, getting all the required infrastructure, onboarding people and the like.

That being said, we are in parallel getting some discussions under way on the more fundamental issues that need to be decided on, so please do check in and take part in discussions.

Next steps

The initial goal for the first few weeks or months is to have discussions and agreements on various scoping and technical issues as well as integrating existing donated material.

After that we want to start building a library of content. The content should be easily searchable.


Getting involved

Resources

At this point the main resource being used is the dev mailing list. 

Please feel free to check out the archive or subscribe with an empty mail to dev-subscribe@training.apache.org and say hi!


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