The Open Badges community has been crying out for a while now for a knowledge repository. You know, somewhere where people can go and find out about how other similar organisations have implemented badge systems, read interesting academic articles and whitepapers, and just discover what’s possible with the Open Badges specification.
That’s why I’m delighted that We Are Open Co-op, with the support of Participate, are building out Badge Wiki. This will be a community-powered project, meaning that it will only be as good as people make it. We’re providing the technical infrastructure and opportunities to pitch in, but we need people to write content, curate resources, and suggest updates!
Tomorrow is the first Badge Wiki ‘barn raising’ session, which we’re running in conjunction with the Open Recognition Alliance. Those who come along don’t need any previous experience with wikis. Nor do they need much knowledge about badges. All you need is a willingness to roll up your sleeves and get involved.
Here’s what to do:
- Join the Loomio group
- Register for a Badge Wiki account
- Join the barn raising session at 16:00 UTC tomorrow (Wednesday 26th July 2017)
Questions? Great! We’ve got answers. If it’s “will participants be issued badges?” the answer is “YES!”. Other questions below, please.
‘Barn Raiser’ badge image courtesy of Bryan Mathers used under a Creative Commons BY-ND license
Update: Martin Hamilton from Jisc kindly recorded my elevator pitch. You can watch it here.
Tomorrow, I’m in London to take part in the Scottish Qualifications Authority‘s Expert Assessment Group. The SQA have been forward-thinking about Open Badges over the last few years, so I’m delighted to have been asked to attend.
There’s five people been asked to give input in the morning from a ‘future of assessment’ point of view, and five in the afternoon on ways technology might be able to help enable that future. I’ve got a very short amount of time, so I’ve boiled it down to the slides below.
(Note: go fullscreen by clicking the arrows in the black bar at the bottom)
Backup locations: Slideshare / Internet Archive
The flow for my pitch starts with a tweet I saw earlier today from the influential Paul Graham. He links to an article in The New York Times which talks about skills-based hiring, but which completely disregards digital credentialing. From there, I discuss Michael Feldstein’s recent post about badging gaining huge traction in very specific areas. And then I launch into a pretty familiar flow using Bryan Mathers‘ excellent visuals.
There’s loads more I want to say about how version 2.0 of the Open Badges specification allows for really interesting dynamic badges that ‘grow’ over time. Kerri Lemoie and Lucas Blair recently wrote about this from a technical point of view, and I presented my thoughts last week at the University of Dundee, including this slide:
Perhaps I’ll get a chance to discuss these new developments if my pitch is selected to be discussed further. I’d bring up blockchain technologies and their potential uses in credentialing, but I’ve got to catch a train back home in the evening…
Photo by John-Mark Kuznietsov on Unsplash
Earlier this year, I wrote about the importance of thinking about a project’s architecture of participation when encouraging contribution from a new or existing community of people.
In that post, I included a checklist containing eight points to consider. I think I’ve got another one to add: get your policies right by soliciting feedback on them.
We Are Open Co-op is currently in the first phase of creating Badge Wiki, a knowledge base for the Open Badges community. It’s a project made possible through the support of Participate.com.
As part of this process, we have to come up with several policies, perhaps the two most important of which are the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. We decided to use the Wikimedia Foundation’s openly-licensed policies as a starting point, adapting them to our needs.
This has thrown up some interesting issues and considerations from an architecture of participation point of view. After all, if people don’t agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, they can’t use Badge Wiki. There are three important ways in which our draft policies differ from the original Wikimedia Foundation source policies:
- CC BY – we propose that Badge Wiki use a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license instead of the CC BY-SA license used on other wikis, including Wikipedia. Although we would encourage them to do so, we recognise that some people may not be in a position to share material they reuse and remix from Badge Wiki under an open license.
- Register to edit – we propose that, in order to edit Badge Wiki, you must have a registered user account, approved by an administrator. This is to prevent valuable contribution time being taken up by wiki vandalism, trolling, and other anti-social behaviours caused by anonymous editing.
- Real name policy – we propose that members of Badge Wiki use their real names on their profile pages, as well as provide a short bio. This is to prevent accusations of sabotage, given that the Open Badges ecosystem includes commercial interests.
You can access the draft Terms of Use and Privacy Policy for Badge Wiki at the links below:
You’re welcome to leave feedback on the posts themselves, in relevant Open Badges Google Group thread, or directly to us: [email protected].
Thanks in advance for your participation and contribution. Remember, comments expressing support and broad agreement are as valuable as expert nitpicking!
