Drumbeat/p2pu/Assessment and Accreditation/Webcraft Assessments - detailed

This is our workspace for hashing out the potential mechanics for authentically assessing competency metrics of specific interest to people participating in the School of Webcraft. This list will grow as more competencies are identified, but it is not meant to be inclusive of all the possible skills and knowledge of interest.

We could use help in identifying specific competencies that are of interest to the open-source programming community. Here are some ideas:

1. If you are an employer of webcraft gurus, please add any criteria of interest to you when you evaluate potential employees. We would also appreciate any information about you that you care to provide so that we can understand why these skills are of interest.
2. We believe it should be possible to perform certain analyses on professional social networks (e.g., LinkedIn). For example, recommendations or job ads could be scanned for passages that relate desirable skills and habits, which can then be cut and pasted into a spreadsheet and analyzed (by hand or using text-analysis software) for commonalities. The resulting dataset could then be subject to consideration by a community of programming peers for validity.
3. If you are aware of any references or other sources of information regarding "hacker habits" or other relevant competencies, please point to them here.

Research Methodology v1 - We are also using a new (to us, at least) method to extract information about skills and habits that web developers find desirable, using LinkedIn as the raw database.

If there is a specific aspect of this page that you feel merits further discussion, please direct your question to the School of Webcraft listserv.

Web development competencies

This is the list of competencies we have thus far. See above for ideas on expanding and refining this list. Note that there is some overlap among these competencies in terms of the specific skills and knowledge that the competencies are intended to capture. We have gone ahead and started to group and outline the list here. We may need to do a more extensive round of cleaning this up once we are satisfied that we have sufficient data in hand.

Some of the list items lead to a separate page where we can hash out the component parts and measurement options in detail.

Communication skills

• Good at answering other people's questions
  • Able to mentor others
• Work well with other programmers
  • Best community contribution - helping others perform better, even if at own expense
  • Community engagement
  • Negotiation
• Provide (negative) feedback constructively
  • Onramping - the ability to bring a new contributor into a project by giving constructive feedback
  • Bedside manners - letting people down softly as to not demotivate them
• Asynchronous tasking and communication (*SoW relies on this – they'll drop out otherwise*)
• Writing, written, and verbal - as in excellent and proven writing skills or excellent written and verbal communication skills

Project management, leadership

• Delegate work effectively
• Make firm strategic decisions
• Provide (negative) feedback constructively
• Onramping - the ability to bring a new contributor into a project by giving constructive feedback
• Bedside manners - letting people down softly as to not demotivate them
• Benevolent dictator - making decisions when the group is divided
• Best community contribution - helping others perform better, even if at own expense
• Delegation
• Community engagement
• Managing the politics of a project
• Negotiation
• Tie breaking - moving out of deadlock
• Team building - having the right people at the right place
• Asynchronous tasking and communication (*SoW relies on this – they'll drop out otherwise*)
• Able to mentor others.

Creativity, personalization

• Able to build stuff for people, not machines
• Blogging - shouting at the top of your lungs about things you're passionate about
• Passionate
• Able to mentor others.
• Agile - as in agile software development
• Creative - as in strong, flexible, creative flair
• Analytical - as in strong analytical skills
• Attention - as in attention to detail
• Attitude - as in positive attitude
• Fast - as in working in a fast paced environment
• Thinker - as in logical thinker or critical thinker

Modes of operation

• Ability to use IRC and other web dev tools
• Ability to join an open source community
• Use version control
• Community engagement
• Asynchronous tasking and communication (*SoW relies on this – they'll drop out otherwise*)
• Able to mentor others.
• Designing - as in experience designing and optimizing code