Re: Voluntary (and non-) Standards (was: Support for Verifiable Claims)

Because I'm responsible for coordinating spec-development progress on Open Badges, I've been paying close attention to attempts to standardize and cooperate in the educational credentials and competency-based-education recognition space. There are a bunch of efforts operating right now in the area of the education use cases scoped out in the VC proposal.

As I shared earlier in this thread, in January, the Open Badges Specification is moving into IMS Global to bring it to the next level of impact and investment. As I mentioned before, we are weighing heavily directly using Verifiable Claims to serve certain use cases in our spec and several key tools.

My observations as I've been working with Open Badges over the last 4 years as it graduated from Mozilla to the Badge Alliance and now to IMS Global, is that:
There are quite a few organizations who want to work together to use a standard for educational credentials,
The developers from many of these organizations are ready to be implement the next version of Open Badges,
Foundations are ready to spend more to support projects that move toward common vocabulary and tool development (see the Lumina-funded Credential Engine/CTI project)
Collaborative vocab-development efforts need support and organizational infrastructure to get things done. (The Badge Alliance has been struggling a bit this year because we didn't quite have capacity to work hard on our spec or to effect a distributed funding model. The move into IMS will give our corner of the
Efforts in this space are very heads-up, aware of what others are doing, and interested in visible standardization efforts that cooperate and interrelate.
There is a big ~80/20 split between developers who can successfully implement from documentation and fewer who can meaningfully contribute to spec development, but there are a bunch of organizations trying to commit developers to Open Badges and other forms of digital credentials whose leaders all are angling toward compatibility. (see also Blockcerts, eTranscript)
I'm officially on vacation this week (somehow easier to find time to write a longer email when I have an excuse to not answer other ones), so apologies if I am contributing without deep source references. These are mostly personal observations, though I can provide lists of companies and efforts that relate to each point. The VCTF group did a pretty comprehensive survey of companies as part of preparing this proposal as well, and I've generally found this group to be responding to a market that is trying to implement something together, as opposed to trying to be entirely anticipatory.

We have now passed over 1 million awarded badges that are currently stored in one of several "backpack" platforms that have implemented Open Badges. Having the opportunity to collect membership fees to provide steady funding for the organization of this work through IMS Global is going to help me do a much better job developing on the specification side of the Open Badges ecosystem after January. IMS doesn't have the expertise or interest to work on the layer of this technology area that the VCTF is proposing the W3C work on, but we'd love to collaborate with another group that has technologies at other layers in their scope.

Nate Otto
Director of Technology, Badge Alliance
badgealliance.org <http://badgealliance.org/>