What’s new with Open Badges?

Those keeping track will know that last year I moved teams within the Mozilla Foundation. I moved away from the Open Badges team to focus on (what is now) the Web Literacy Map. Despite this, I still have close ties to the Open Badges team. In fact, I’m currently helping design Webmaker and Web Literacy badges.

The big news at the start of 2014 on the Open Badges front is that there’s a new Badge Alliance to grow and develop the wider ecosystem. The Badge Alliance is a non-profit organisation to be led by Erin Knight, co-founder of the Open Badges Infrastructure (OBI). Over the next few months she’ll be joined at the Badge Alliance with a few members of the current Open Badges team. There’s more detail in Erin’s blog post.

Happily, Mozilla will continue to develop and nurture the open source technical stack behind the OBI. The next milestone is the release of BadgeKit in the next few months. This should remove any remaining friction from issuing Open Badges. For more on BadgeKit be sure to follow the blogs of Sunny Lee and Chris McAvoy. And, as ever, you should also follow Carla Casilli’s posts on badge system design.

If you want to keep up with what’s going on with Open Badges in general, the easiest thing to do is to keep tabs on the Open Badges blog. The weekly ‘Badger Beats’ in particular is a useful round-up of news from the world of badges. There’s also a good deal of conversation within the Open Badges discussion group. This is a friendly forum for those planning to dip their toes into the water for the first time.

Having joined Mozilla in 2012 to work both on the Open Badges project and (what’s grown into) the Web Literacy Map. I’m delighted that the former has been incubated with such success. I’m also pleased that the latter is to underpin both the next iteration of Webmaker and Mozilla’s aims to create a more web literate planet.

If you’d like to get involved with Mozilla’s work to create a better web then we’d love to have you onboard! The easiest way to get involved with the two projects I’ve mentioned is to join their respective weekly calls. The Open Badges community call is every Wednesday, and you can join us for the new #TeachTheWeb community call every Thursday.

Questions? I’ll do my best to respond to them in the comments below.

Image CC BY-NC-SA RSC Scotland