This year at FINOS we are focusing on one of FINOS' key existing projects: Open Source Readiness. This is FINOS' term for helping the finance industry "do open source properly". 

We’re between Open Source Readiness (OSR) meetings at the moment -  the next SIG meeting is on Wednesday 7th June and then after that it’s the FINOS Open House on June 14th, so I guess I’ll talk about something else OSR-related that’s coming up the pipe at the moment…

Certification

Let’s start with certification first. It’s always been our ambition to launch a developer certification for developers who are contributing to open source projects. There are lots of reasons to want to do this:

• Obviously, to demonstrate ability. It’s great to be able to put on your CV that you’ve passed an exam and are therefore qualified to do something!   
• To advertise. We want everyone to know that people are working on open source in the finance industry! Having them share their qualifications on LinkedIn or show them on their CV is a way of telling everyone that this is happening.
• Passporting. Passing a test written by your employer is all very well, but you’ll have to prove yourself again if you change jobs. There should be no need for that repetition.
• Normalisation. Getting lots of staff certified within a given firm helps normalise the behaviour of contributing to open source. This is an important part of the cultural change we want to happen in the finance industry - and one of the main reasons FINOS exists.

"The FINOS / TODO Certified Open Source Developer exam is designed for developers contributing to open source projects whilst  working in financial institutions internationally.” 

So, what’s our exam going to cover? I’ve taken the Body Of Knowledge as a starting point and broken it down into some key topics such as:

Tooling: How to use GitHub, comments, markdown, PRs, etc.

Ethics and Behaviour: How to comport yourself on an open source project, using inclusive language and interacting with maintainers, collaborators and foundations.

Open Source Licenses: License characteristics (permissions, obligations, conditions), CopyLeft, CLAs, DCO etc.

Safely Consuming Open Source: understanding the software supply chain, vulnerabilities, approval processes and your responsibilities around choosing dependencies

Contributing To Open Source: Working with your OSPO, following internal processes, when to fork code, how to avoid data leakage.

Understanding Regulations: and how they apply to open source contributions, such as IP law, sanctions, labor law, anti-money laundering and so on

…and Escalating: Examples of where there are issues, non-issues, when and who to escalate to in each case.

Does this sound interesting? We’re having a kick-off meeting to discuss this on 6th July, so reach out if you’d like to get involved.

Or, if you want to be one of the first people to take (and hopefully pass) this new qualification then please sign up to our FREE beta program here [form now closed].

Author: Rob Moffat

Interested in this FINOS open source project, or any of our other projects? Click the link below to see how to get involved in the FINOS Community.