What could be helpful to get contributor training on?

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

Hi Paul

> On 9. Mar 2018, at 09:22, Paul Brown <paul.brown at kde.org> wrote:
> 
> On jueves, 8 de marzo de 2018 21:40:00 (CET) Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
>> Dear KDE community,
>> With the $200k donation from the Pineapple Fund [1], we have some money
>> available which we can invest in KDE’s future. We are currently thinking
>> about what to best invest in, and one of the ideas was to pay for
>> professional training in some skills for contributors. For that, we’d like
>> to know which skills would be most useful for us to have in order to take
>> KDE further?
>> 
>> This can be soft or hard skills, but it would probably make sense to train
>> things which we don’t already learn naturally from our collaboration
>> anyway.
>> 
>> So, what do you think?
>> 
>> Thank you in advance for your input,
>> Thomas
> 
> Hello Thomas,
> 
> Would these courses have to be distance, online learning? Or could they be 
> intensive, on-site courses organised at KDE gatherings, like Akademy, 
> something like two day workshops?
> 
The thought process is currently at the stage of "Using funds for training might be a good idea”, so from the board’s perspective, anything is possible :)
We’d have to see what would be the most efficient/effective overall.

> On my wishlist would be:
> 
> - *Creative writing* - to help everybody improve their blogging and 
> presentation-composing skills. 
> 
> - *Public speaking* - to help everybody deliver better talks.
> 
> If we are going to try and captivate larger audiences, we want to be able to 
> communicate better. Having developers, that already have a deep knowledge of 
> their own technology, be able to explain it in clear and interesting way, will 
> help with that at internal and external events.
> 
> I know for a fact that Sun used to do this for people they sent to speaking 
> venues, and you could always tell. 
> 
> I know many people think they can write because the have knowledge of spelling 
> and grammar, or speak in public because they have... well, mouths, but this is 
> a fallacy. There are plenty of things to learn to know how to structure and 
> compose a text, be it for a blog post, product announcement or script for a 
> presentation; as well as plenty of techniques you can acquire to make your 
> talks more interesting, bot at the organisational level and during the 
> execution.
> 
> I, for one, would love to attend courses on this.
> 
Thank you for these ideas!