Open Badges board slides

As announced in another post, we’ve created the Mozilla Open Badges project to tap into the huge potential for badges as a way to incent and recognize learning online.

For Mozilla, there is an additional opportunity: badges may well become a significant part of our online reputation and identity. We could use our work on identity to speed up Open Badges, and use Open Badges to promote our thinking about identity.

Open Badges is built around this dual learning + identity goal set. Early plans are outlined in this presentation (pdf) that I gave to the Mozilla Foundation board last month (9 mins):

Erin Knight will be taking on the role of Open Badges Product Manager, which includes broad leadership on this project as well as continued work on the School of Webcraft badges pilot. Brian Brennan is technical lead for the project. Dan Mills and Mike Hanson are technical advisors.

Given the early stage, there are many details we’re still working out. However, things we already know we want to do include:

  • Alpha badge backpack plus end-to-end demo planned for deployment on P2PU in Q3 2011.
  • Seeking badge issuing partners through Q3 – Q4 2011. White House Office of Science and Tech / Dept. of Education may be interested.
  • Release beta / firm metadata spec by January 2012.
  • Work with MacArthur partner projects on more end-to-end deployments Q1 – Q3 2012.
  • Related: badge issuers publish to our system / creating widgets to re-publish to 3rd parties. Also, infrastructure and UX more robust.
  • Q3 2012(?): encourage wide adoption of ‘backpack’.

If you’ve got ideas or feedback, or if you have a badge project you want to hook into this, please contact Erin or I. Or visit the Open Badges Wiki.

Comments

  1. gilliankerrGillian Kerr replied on | Reply

    Have you seen the Open Researcher ID initiative that’s sponsored by CrossRef and many of the major academic publishers? They are trying to create a common ID that recognizes a whole range of contributions (e.g., reviewing, data analysis, blogging), not only academic writing. They’ve spent years defining the requirements, so even if you don’t create an interoperable framework you could take advantage of their analysis of the hellishly complex issues relating to identities and contributions. Some background is here:
    http://blogs.nature.com/mfenner/2010/01/03/orcid-or-how-to-build-a-unique-identifier-for-scientists-in-10-easy-steps. Web site is http://orcid.org, which includes lots of documents on functionality and requirements.

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