I'll share my note via email instead of on a meeting today:
As many of you already know, the Badge Alliance has been the standards body
for the Open Badges Specification <https://openbadgespec.org>. In October,
we announced that IMS Global would adopt the Specification as of January
2017. (See Press Release:
https://www.imsglobal.org/article/ims-global-mozilla-foundation-and-lrng-announce-next-steps-accelerate-evolution-open-badges
)
following publication of the 2.0 version by the Badge Alliance.
I just wanted to take a moment to update this group to confirm that this
has all been moving forward as planned. IMS Global will have its first Open
Badges Work Group meeting on January 12, now available to IMS Members. They
will be setting up a "Community Council", which is a new structure to
ensure that this work gets adequate feedback from developers who are not
affiliated with the types of vendors and institutions who are the best fit
for IMS membership and other members of the public. Look out for
announcements from IMS coming up on how to connect.
The Open Badges 2.0 Recommendation has been released by the Badge Alliance.
It formalizes that Open Badges are expressed in JSON-LD and adds a number
of new optional upgrades that come along with that, allowing issuers to
embed more metadata in the badges that previously were only expressed as
URLs.
We've also introduced a system called "Endorsements" that uses the VCTF
prototype data model. In order to confirm that a particular hosted Open
Badges profile actually corresponds to the property values it claims,
endorsement claims are used to share why you should trust this email
address or that url. It will be very exciting to build these capabilities
into products over the coming year.
See fuller changelog/notes:
https://github.com/openbadges/openbadges-specification/pull/99
We are now beginning a preimplementation phase, to be orchestrated by IMS
Global. I'd like to see the spec be adopted in the first quarter of the
year by multiple issuers, validators and backpacks as it offers some pretty
important security improvements.
IMS is now in the driver's seat. If you have questions, they've got an info
line at openbadgesinfo@imsglobal.org.
Nate Otto