2016 Developments at the Badge Alliance

by James Willis and Dan Hickey in conjunction with Nate Otto

At the end of 2015 and beginning of 2016, there have been a number of changes at the Badge Alliance. In a recent blog posting, Nate Otto, Director of the Badge Alliance, sets out an ambitious agenda for 2016. Beyond the on-going work of supporting productive and evidence-rich badging projects, the Badge Alliance is also concentrating efforts on communicating across the various communities and providing technical support to the ecosystem. We summarize some of those initiatives here.
Transitioning from interim director to director, Nate Otto is helping to steer the Badge Alliance in several major directions. with the focus on building trustworthy, understandable digital credentials. He recently helped hire Devin Lally to manage the communications of the Badge Alliance, Chris Crytzer to recenter the dispersed documentation produced over the first five years of the project, and Oren Robinson to kickstart development on key community-maintained pieces of the Open Badges ecosystem infrastructure.

Chris Crytzer, Badge Alliance Technical Writer

Devin Lally, Badge Alliance Community Manager

Oren Robinson, Badge Alliance Developer

In the first half of 2016, the Badge Alliance Standard Working Group is working toward a 2.0 specification and work on the ecosystem. This includes:

• "Identity and privacy, including COPPA-compliant badges for under-13s and Linked Data recipient profiles.
• Connected Badges - learning pathways and stackable badges
• Linked Data Signatures
• Endorsement
• Templates for Multiple Issuer Badges
• Badge Content Licenses
• Linked Data Embedded Criteria and Evidence
• Multi-Language Badges and Internationalization." 

In the Ecosystem, the Badge Alliance will be working toward:

• "v2.0 Issuer Adoption
• Federated Backpack Protocol: near and long-term solutions
• Open Badges Service Framework
• Standard Compliance Certification with partner IMS Global" 

Documentation across the Badge Alliance will focus on Medium and openbadges.org. Additional communication will take the form of three Working Groups (Standard, Higher Ed, and Taxonomies) and three Task Forces (Endorsement, Localization & Internationalization, and Federation). The Wednesday community call helps to pull together resources inside the community, as well as provide a good introduction to those new to open badges. The community call occurs each Wednesday at 9am Pacific / 12pm Eastern / 6pm Western Europe); the Twitter handle @OpenBadges announces a link to the Etherpad used each week.

Our Open Badges in Higher Education project helps sponsor the bi-weekly Higher Education Working Group, featuring speakers doing some of the most innovative projects in post-secondary education. A joint calendar helps announce the events.

The Badge Alliance will continue to provide support for the widely-distributed open badges community. We look forward to seeing how the ecosystem continues to develop and evolve in 2016!