Hello Everyone:
As part of our efforts towards EPF enablement, I have
reserved the following domain names which I will donate to EPF:
www.epfalliance.com
www.epfalliance.org
www.openepf.com
www.openepf.org
Ok that's all well and good, so why do we need an EPF
website, or what will differentiate the EPF website from www.eclipse.org/epf? The way that I
see it is the eclipse website is the development website, this is where we
create and share content and enablement materials - essentially try to set the
"gold standard" for what EPF is and the content for enablement
materials. The EPF website supports the EPF user community with blogs, and
experience reports about the adoption and use of EPF and not about the day to
day struggle of developing EPF (although this is where we may find a strategic
wish list). The EPF website would also become the "practice" exchange,
people are able to contribute their practices to others without necessarily
having to go through eclipse. The site also support for a certification program.
How should this all work? Here is a possible scenario:
1) we form a not for profit society - EPF Alliance which is
responsible for promoting EPF
2) EPF alliance owns the EPF website
3) The initial EPF board are the eclipse committers and
regular contributors
4) We create an EPF cirriculum - potentially including exams
5) We create "core training content" For example,
the two slide sets attached to this e-mail are taken from larger courses
I am creating. These "core" sets are contributed to www.eclipse.org and anyone can use them to
create EPF training material.
6) We certify EPF trainers. Certification is based on the
trainer following the cirriculum and starting with our "core"
material. Individual EPF trainers can all have variations and mix and match,
but we know the core ideas are presented consistently.
7) We post white papers, blogs on EPF usage
8) We provide links to EPF trainers
9) etc….
The attached slide set is just a sample of how we could
present EPF structure and content. I am building a larger course around this.
The sample is small to get this e-mail in under EPF-Dev's 10MB limit. On
the Eclipse website we could keep a set of "core" courses (even a
core set of clip art with the representative symbols for EPF, e.g. the flower
petal model - if we agree that is how we want to model this). This set of
slides shows how to grow EPF up to accommodate a requirements discipline - in
this example use cases. Imagine for a moment someone who wanted to incorporate
a different requirements practice, or an MDD practice into EPF, they
could take a core set of notes, and show how to build up the kernel to support
MDD. Or CM or…. you get the idea. We have consistent way of
presenting EPF while letting any number of practitioners put their own unique
spin on it.
These are just some ideas I'm tossing out there, but in
business I believe you make money by making it possible for other people to use
your product/service to make money. I think we can enable EPF if we make it
easy for other people to enable EPF… shall we discuss this tomorrow? What
I would like to discover if anyone else shares this vision. If enough of us do,
then we should start developing a real action plan ( - where to host the EPF
site, creating standard presentation contents, an EPF cirriculum, etc)
One more suggestion, sooner or later we will likely have
another EPF F2F. Rather than doing a conventional F2F, what do you think to
turning this into an EPF conference, possibly making an arrangement to publish?
This is not something I want to take on for the near term, but is it possible
we could for example co-locate an EPF conference with a RUC?
best regards,
Steve Adolph