Re: Openbadges and Mozilla Persona

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»
>>
>>
>