Re: New and Improved Google Docs site for Roadmap

I've taken an action to review the current roadmap and provide a draft of a
section for the Credentials Vocabulary.

I looked at the Identity Credentials (current draft)
http://opencreds.org/specs/source/identity-credentials/ and the Open Badges
specification (current draft) openbadges.github.io/openbadges-specification/
as I was reading the roadmap, trying to focus on how these different
documents, and the slices of the tech stack they represent fit together.

I hope to have some good progress on this Credentials Vocabulary component
by our meeting on Tuesday.

I started writing some notes to myself on this question of language:* Is a
"credential" some thing made up of claims by many parties, or would that be
"a set of credentials?"*

In the roadmap, "credential" is treated as a single item made up of
constituent components:
> "A credential is a multi-entity claim that denotes qualification,
achievement, quality, or other pieces of information about an entity’s
background such as a name, government ID, payment provider, home address,
or university degree."

In the Open Badges community, we often talk about badges as granular
assertions of a particular achievement, created by one entity (the issuer).
It's possible to use badges to assert the achievement of multiple criteria,
but most badges are designed to make a simple claim (about a certain,
named, skill, for example). Though there aren't any working implementations
I know of that treat compositions of badges as a unit of analysis the way
the authors of the Identity Credentials spec document have been powerfully
able to, the informal thinking in the Open Badges community is all about
allowing earners to combine multiple badges from different issuers together
in a single place for them to be considered by a consumer, like in a job
seeker's resume that summarizes accomplishments from different parts of her
career history in one document.

So I've been thinking of each single-entity claim within Identity
Credentials as a single "credential", and a document that contains multiple
credentials as a "composition of credentials" rather than a single
"credential" itself. This seems consistent with the Identity Credentials
spec, where "credentials" in the identity document is an array of signed
claimsets, each made by a single entity.

As I'm sure will be reflected in the upcoming Design Principles
Documentation Project report (I was involved in this project for about a
year 2013-14), we received thorough feedback from a sociologist, Michael
Olneck, who pushed hard on how we defined "credential", -- even as many
fields are very casual with how they use the term. His push was that a
qualification/achievement/certificate only becomes a credential in the
process of being used to indicate that an entity is suited for something (a
job, opportunity, access, collaboration, etc.). I don't disagree with all
uses of "credential" outside of this strict definition, but I think it can
be useful to consider.

The credentials we're talking about in this group are forward-looking in
this sense of anticipating exchange and use for qualification. Serving that
purpose is the essence of packaging them in a consumable format like an
Identity Credential document.

And I think the notion of composing credentials from multiple issuer
identities is the more powerful way to use this forward-looking definition
of the word, rather than a notion of building up one identity's credential
into completeness. The first gives a sense of remixability and adaptation
to multiple purposes that I like.

*Nate Otto, Developer*
concentricsky.com

On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 6:46 AM, Leuba, Mark <mleuba@pathway-technology.com>
wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> With the help of Manu and Timothy we see the issue was my Google account
> was under a private domain, making public sharing problematic.
>
>
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Tm5E9GBlWZsftEPiTu0ZZsGqwqYwtOOWwsYIU-cbQwQ/edit
>
>
> We have moved the document to a public domain, please feel free to review
> and comment.  Thanks for your patience.
>
> Regards, Mark
>
>