I've been kicking this around for a little bit now in my own head, and I'd like to propose that the project develop a strategy around user education and training. For those who don't know, in my "day job", I work for Novell's Technical Training department as the testing program manager. In particular, I have responsibility for the business end of the practicum exam delivery (and if you want to talk about that with me, feel free to contact me off- list, I'm always happy to talk to people about their exam experiences, even if I can't get into specific details for their exam). In my role, I also am involved in technical certification, and work closely with people who develop training (I used to be a trainer myself for eDirectory, and developed the training materials to meet objectives we had for that product) as well as being involved to some extent in developing the next generation of training delivery. I was intrigued by an article in this month's Linux Format about Ubuntu's "Lernid" training system. It sounds like that project has a plan of sorts for training users on using their system, and this seems to me to be a way in which we could grow the community from which we are looking to draw contributors. In the forums, we've also had a couple of people express that some training on openSUSE would be very helpful and useful for them (either personally or to help people they knew learn about Linux and start using it). The way I see it, we could break down training into a few classifications: 1. End-user training 2. Contributor training (for example, how to write effective bugs, code style conventions, things like that) 3. Community training (where to ask what, what to expect, that sort of thing). In items 2 & 3, a lot of that content is in the wiki already - I see the largest opportunity as being #1. There may be a loose collection of things that fit in there as well (such as the howtos for configuring certain video cards), but from a training perspective, some structure and flow between the topics (along with analysis of how the topics can/should flow from one to another) is something that's I think is missing (I may be wrong and just haven't looked in the right places). What I'd like is for the project team to consider that end-user education (in particular) is something that could help us attract more users and help them achieve a more comprehensive view of how to use openSUSE more effectively. Things like skills migration from Windows to openSUSE would be something I see as key; one forum user put it as "people learn by making connections to that which they already know"; I see that in my official job role as well - the students who are most successful are the ones who can associate what they're learning with something they already know - even if it's not a direct 1:1 mapping. Thoughts? Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org