Re: Openbadges and Mozilla Persona

Thanks for the reply, Fabio. I found my last message in my drafts folder
accidentally unsent from a couple weeks ago. I'm sorry to have left you
waiting but glad you're still engaged in the topic!

There was a discontinuity in Badge Alliance funding in 2015 as the project
moved out from under the wing of th Mozilla Foundation. We've now been
directly picked up by Collective Shift (http://collectiveshift.org), which
in its previous incarnation as the Digital Media and Learning portfolio of
the MacArthur Foundation had funded the Open Badges work within Mozilla. I
was brought on last July to get things started again. We may or may not use
that specific mailing list to drive discussion on the infrastructure this
year, but I will at least post an announcement to all of the historical
lists.

As I said, a couple announcements coming up in the next weeks on the next
evolution of the infrastructure conversation. Mozilla will be engaged,
we've now got some dedicated developer resources to work on solutions, but
we definitely need considered perspectives like yours to investigate. I'll
keep you updated individually as we get started. (follow @OpenBadges on
Twitter or http://medium.com/badge-alliance)


Nate

On Wed, Jan 20, 2016, 5:50 AM Fabio Barone <holon.earth@gmail.com> wrote:

> Awesome Nate,
>
> thanks for this detailed update.
>
> Are the working groups open? Is there any way to participate?
> Yesterday I checked the BadgeAlliance OBI working group page (technical
> infrastructure), but the last activity I could detect was from 2014.
>
> I am willing to contribute code, assuming the whole endeavour is open
> source (I am a software developer with 15+ years experience).
>
> To me, it would be worthwhile exploring the introducition of some
> "standard" protocol between identification, issuing and presentation.
>
> I was wanting to write a project proposal for the municipality, involving
> a number of independent institutions.
> I realized this approach could be quite complex, a project dependent on
> too many people to say "yes" may not have the best odds for success.
>
> My current approach is to build a prototype, and go with that prototype to
> the officials for endorsement and contiuation of the project.
> If that doesn't succeed, it could be worthwhile continuing between
> independent collectives and groups of the city.
>
> So ideally, I would like to have:
> - A completely independent login mechanism from issuing and backbpack
> - An independent display mechanism
>
> Again ideally, the display could be with an API, so that arbitrary sites
> would be able to display open badges (say like "disqus" for comments today).
> This is also to locally "brand" initiatives, including language (of course
> here it would need to be Spanish).
>
> Login could be akin (or with) OAuth 2.0, in order to allow people to reuse
> this identity for other sites (a "city" identity).
>
>
>
> 2016-01-20 0:54 GMT-05:00 Nate Otto <nate@ottonomy.net>:
>
>> Fabio, interesting question
>>
>> One point to clarify about Open Badges is that the open spec is not tied
>> to Mozilla Persona login. The Mozilla-hosted "Backpack" software that is
>> currently in a sort of central position in the ecosystem does currently
>> rely on Persona for login, but it is really up to a "consumer" of a badge
>> to trust that the person in front of you corresponds to the email address
>> recognized by the badge. The role Persona played in the Backpack was to
>> outsource the authentication of the logged in user as representing the
>> email address identifier in their badges. This is a general problem though,
>> not something that can only be solved by Persona.
>>
>> Persona will be end-of-lifed, because it never got the distributed user
>> agent adoption that was initially designed for it. It was intended to be
>> built into browsers so that persona.org would not be a centralized
>> component of the system, but that never happened, so the whole login system
>> remained dependent on this centralized component that soon may disappear.
>> To protect against this disappearance, Mozilla Backpack accounts will be
>> migrated to an internal login system that serves the same function
>> (verifying email addresses for logins).
>>
>> In the Badge Alliance, we are kicking off a round of discussion on
>> identifiers for badges as we ramp up to a 2.0 spec release to be compatible
>> with the proposed work in the Web Payment IG's Verifiable Claims Task Force.
>>
>> Stay tuned for Mozilla and Badge Alliance announcements on Persona, the
>> Backpack, and 2016 plans in the coming week.
>>
>> Nate
>> Badge Alliance
>>
>> On Sat, Jan 2, 2016 at 12:54 PM, Asbjørn Ulsberg <asbjorn@ulsberg.no>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> 2016-01-01 1:29 GMT+03:00 Fabio Barone <holon.earth@gmail.com>:
>>>
>>> > According to the site, Openbadges uses Mozilla Persona.
>>> > I think to remember that Mozilla Persona has been heavily discussed in
>>> this
>>> > group, and I also think to remember that there were some rumors
>>> circulating
>>> > of a possible demise.
>>>
>>> I don't know much about the subject, but Manu Sporny has written quite
>>> extensively about it:
>>>
>>> http://manu.sporny.org/2015/credentials-retrospective/
>>>
>>> --
>>> Asbjørn Ulsberg           -=|=-        asbjorn@ulsberg.no
>>> «He's a loathsome offensive brute, yet I can't look away»
>>>
>>>
>>
>