Guilds - an alternative to top-down certification? November 9, 2010

One of the problems for people who do their learning outside of formal institutions is the lack of traditional accreditation. Here is alternative approach from the Drupal people:

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The Open Guilds website at http://openguilds.org/ (and its cousin http://drupalguilds.org/ for Drupal) is a central location for grassroots certifications for practitioners of various Open Source software. The idea is that rather than a top-down certification process where people pay money to an organization to take a test, people instead prove to their peers their ability to craft in their field.

The organization of Open Guilds is set up to foster a peer review system. Anyone may create a guild within the organization, and set up their own certification procedures at various levels within the guild. Each guild will stand on its own merit, and gain the benefit of camaraderie from other related guilds.

Each guild within Open Guilds will (more )