I have been reading about Drupal certification as of late and was posting some thoughts on the Lullobots blog in a comment and thought it was worth repeating here for conversations sake.
I have been thinking about what is the most important thing to clients when I engage them for building trust in the business relationship. Certifications seem to be the old school way (just think MS certs at $1500/pop or more) of showing your credentials. In my experience I have worked with enough folks that had a resume full of expensive certifications but didn't seem to have two cents worth of customer service skills or business integrity. In open source software there seems to be two kinds of real credibility/reputation... your contributions to the oss project and/or your client recommendations from past work. I have been thinking that a rating system for clients and community members could be an excellent way for the Drupal world to offer the potential client real feedback and some quality control. An Ebay type system (though not without its flaws) or some other such rating system that allows clients and developers a mechanism for publicly available feedback on each other could do the trick.
This could be administered by a credible organization (have discussed the idea somewhat with Acquia because they have already attempted some developer vetting) so the outside world would recognize and trust the ratings. Client Y could register that a project is being built by Developer X and Developer X could agree this is true. Then once the project completes they could each offer feedback and a rating of the other.
This helps solve a few problems for the community:
1. Good developers can build reputation (true certification) beyond posting the proverbial "happy client reviews and logos" on their own sites. (Which I use heavily by the way but also feel can be meaningless because they are not verified in any way.) This also serves the purpose of weeding out the lame duck developers who ditch their clients mid project or deliver half baked goods and move on to the next unsuspecting mark.
2. Good clients can build a reputation and I would imagine have a much easier time of getting new development help should they need it. I know when a client is referred to me with positive feedback from a trusted source on their working process, on-time payment of invoices, etc - I am much more eager to work with and service their needs. This also allows the community to flush out those time/energy sucking clients that seems to bounce from shop to shop getting as much up-front free work as they can before not paying invoices and/or being the general pain in the ass they are. ;)
3. Good developers can then also rate other good developers lending credibility to each other where deserved. This helps the "new guy" who is a solid developer come up through the ranks and land gigs. It also has some self regulation in that a developer with a high rating will be careful about who they recommend and therefore "share" their rating with.
So if I take myself as a use case I have found as a Site Architect/UX Designer/Themer my best contributions to the community have been when I can build attractive and functional/user friendly drupal sites for happy clients who tell all their business buddies Drupal is the best thing since sliced bread. Though not a direct code contribution I have found this gives back to the community which lends itself to building reputation both for myself and Drupal. Ultimately it would seem this kind of feedback is what has propelled Drupal to the level it is at and though it has some impressive technical specs on paper (the equivalent to certifications) it is other clients/users recommendations that bring Drupal into the room. It would be sweet to have a credible place for this feedback to be created, shared, and valued.
