Blog

Hello,

If you are in the USA, Happy Thanksgiving. If you are not in the USA, Happy Thanksgiving.

You may have noticed that there hasn't been a site update in a long time. I think the overwhelming feeling among the groupies is sadness that we don't have time to put in the energy to the site that we want to. As the french say: Le bummer.

Now what?

Do you have great hope for CertifiedToRock? Do you have time to put into it? Great!

Hello Drupal fans,

Hot on the heels of the announcement of our groupies program designed to expand Certified to Rock and make it more community driven, we are releasing a new set of scores. We are excited to announce the first new groupies though we are still solidifying the group. Look for an announcement on that in the coming weeks and remember that if you would like to join we are looking for candidates (see the post for details on how to join).

With the recent acquisition of GVS by Acquia many people are curious what will happen to Certified to Rock. Acquia has long been thinking about certifications and how to do them well in the Drupal community. But there was a clear sense by those involved in Certified to Rock that CTR would best be served by remaining an independent project. You may have noticed that the site design changed a little bit.

Certified to Rock has recently finished re-calculating ratings, with fresher data and a new algorithm. This is the second update of 2011, after the January 2011 refresh that added 82,000 people in the system. It is the third algorithm update since the April 2010 launch at Drupalcon San Francisco.

Our latest score update saw some interesting changes. We updated the site and we refreshed the data. We added 58,000 people to the system. It's now at 82,003 rockstars!

Some highlights:

In his great keynote presentation at the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit Josh Koenig (CTR level 6) had a lot of great quotes, but one that really struck me was that

the smartest, most creative person in the room may be the guy who just walked in.

His point is that if we only look to current members and contributors to lead us then we will lose out on the people who will really grow the project in the next 5 years.

If you ask most folks they'll say that there is no certification for Drupal. However, the truth is far from that. There are at least 3 launched programs and 1 planned certification.

Big news for Certified To Rock! We've just published a new algorithm that has updated scores for the 6,000 rockstars already in the system, and added scores for around 18,000 more rockstars. We now have scores for over 24,000 rockstars! This is the first update to the scores and algorithm since our launch during DrupalCon San Francisco.

More metrics

This release includes a few new metrics, and changes to the algorithm, meaning scores are calculated differently than before. We believe this change has produced a better measurement of rockstardom.

In an earlier post about bin sizes we gave some explanation about how our system works in terms of relative value of a particular score (always keeping in mind that this is the 1.0 version of the site and updates to the algorithms are always "just around the corner").

If you're a nerdy data analysis person you like to talk about "bins" of users.

CertifiedToRock.com has a scale from 1 to 11, but there are more 1s than there are 11s. The "bins" are not equal.

We really want to promote involvement in the project with this certification system. So, it's easy to move from a 1 to a 2. It's a little harder to move from a 2 to a 3 etc. This is about giving people success early so they become addicted to it.

But then going up the scale at the high end our goal was to make the scale into a useful distinction between levels of contribution.