The inflation of certifications on Advogato disappoints me.

I really wish people would read the certification guidelines before certifying others as "Master" willy-nilly. To be honest, I think that if I deserve a certification as "Master" it's borderline: it hinges upon the fact that Twisted Python is a good open source project, "one that many people depend on, or one that stands out in quality".

I appreciate my peers having given me this confidence, but it is sadly not meaningful. A brief troll through the Advogato network revealed to me maybe 15 or 20 people with "Master" level certification who had made no contribution whatsoever to the open source community, as far as I can tell. (No, a sourceforge page that says "This project has not released any files" does not qualify as a "contribution".)

If you read this, please take some time to lower any certifications you have made that you know are inflated. If you feel you might offend people by ranking them lower than the norm, look at it this way: the overall trust metric may be hopelessly inflated, but your personal certification should still be worth something. It is still quite a compliment, I think, to have people thinking I am a Journeyer! After all, "Journeyers are the people who make free software happen."

The only reason my purple-y banner is of any value to me is because raph ranks me as Master, and it's not because he's close to the root: it's because he's someone who I do not know, and who has very few Master rankings in a very long certification list.