Advogato Trust Certifications

One of the more interesting features of Advogato is its mechanism for certifying free software developers. The current system recognizes the combination of talent and dedication in three levels: Apprentice, Journeyer, and Master. All these levels are determined by peer certification. These certificates are entered in individual records from the People page. This document explains what the levels mean, and guidelines for deciding what level of certification to use.

Please feel free to certify all of the free software developers you know who have accounts here, especially those without many certificates to begin with. The trust metric used to evaluate the certificates is most robust when the certificate graph is dense.


To certify someone, make sure you're logged in, then go to the person's page and use the pulldown form.




Journeyers are the people who make free software happen. A journeyer contributes significantly to an important free software project, or is the author of a useful or technically innovative project. A Journeyer is generally a competent programmer, but significant contributions of documentation, artwork, or other non-code goodies counts too. Ideally, a Journeyer works with others in the free software community to polish and refine the library of free software. While not necessarily the equivalent of full time, a Journeyer spends a significant amount of time on free software.


An apprentice is someone who has contributed in some way to a free software project, but is still striving to acquire the skills and standing in the community to make more significant contributions. Ideally, the Apprentice is in touch with either an individual mentor or a community that helps to gain these skills. An Apprentice spends a significant amount of time learning the craft of software development, whether by hands-on practice, academic study, or careful observation.


A user with no trust certification is referred to as an observer. This is the default trust level of a new user and the level to which you would certify someone to remove an existing trust certification. An observer does not have posting priviledges and other powers associated with trust users. They have read-only access to Advogato, with the exceptions of editing their own user profile and posting blog entries.

Evaluation of the certs

The certificates are evaluated using an attack-resistant trust metric. Keep in mind that all certs have "at least" semantics, so an Apprentice ranking is always better than none (observer).

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