Contribution credit for organizations who hire Inexperienced and/or Junior Drupal Developers

My initial thoughts here:

The Drupal Association has a 'special programs' credit field we can use to grant credit to organizations without needing to build something extra or file a bunch of issues.

We could set a rubric for the value training/hiring an IXP dev. Maybe it's 30 credits a month for example - so in one year, they'd gain 360 credits per IXP. And that credit would last for an additional 12 months if that person left the IXP program.

The question is whether that's quite enough to make that incentive worth while.

Tim - what would be helpful (IMHO) is to have some sense of the relative value of 30 credits/month. What is that roughly equivalent to? What level of financial support of the DA is roughly equivalent to 360 total credits? How much is a case study worth (relatively speaking). I know that you can't divulge exact values of weighting, but I'd love for a full IXP credit to be among the most heavily weighted...

-mike

@ultimike

Right now that would be equivalent to 3 core contributions a month, or 3 case studies on the latest version of Drupal every month - the annual total of 360 credits would be about equivalent of $36,000 of financial contribution to the DA.

So first step is to give an initial weight to this contribution, correct?

I just realized something, we haven't mentioned about guidelines to get the credit.

Should that be here or its own issue?

@hestenet? @ultimike?

I think here is a good place to discuss what guidelines the employer must follow before they get the contribution credit. Throwing some ideas out there...

1. The job must be publicly listed on jobs.drupal.org
2. The job description must specifically indicate that the position is open only to new Drupal developers (or those with < 6 months experience).
3. The job must be a paid position.
4. The employee must stay in the position for at least 6 months.
5. The employer must provide a minimum of 2 hours/week of mentoring of the employee.

The devil in in the details here - what will the process be to verify all this...

-mike

@hestenet,

I'm just re-reading your comments above - quick question - does the award have to be a "per-month" thing? Can it just be a one-time award?

-mike

Yup - we could make a single award representing the full amount of credit - given either at the time of hire, or at the 6 month mark or something like that.