Re: January 3rd VCTF meeting is cancelled

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 <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 <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 <mailto:openbadgesinfo@imsglobal.org>.

Nate Otto