There is the Open Badges initiative. I think it is mainly backed by Acclaim.
The idea is pretty simple: independent of your current workplace, you can do educations, do classes, get certifications that represent a certain level of skill, knowledge, …
Acclaim provides a (commercial) service that allows employees to acquire “badges” that aren’t bound to any employer.
In other words: such claims can be an interesting resource for your CV, or career planning in general.
I can use that service via my employer, and I notice that especially many US coworkers are eager to collect such badges, and to also make that visible (via mail footers and our internal “user directory” pages).
So, just saying: in case “badges” will be used here, it might be nice to have some sort of bridge into this world.
That kinda depends on what the point of badges on the site is going to be, I’d say.
If the main point of badges is stuff that has to do with the system - helpful flags, comments, sharing posts, whathaveyou - then there’s not much point in displaying those other places. Showing familiarity with the Codidact system (probably) isn’t going to be so useful on a resume.
But if badges are awarded for domain expertise, then it’s a different story. (Kinda how tag badges currently work on SE.)
I think that before we consider these, we need to finalize the discussion on whether or not badges will exist in the first badge, and then what people earn badges for. Then we can figure out how to implement them.
But note: even something like a “legendary” badge could be “translated” into some “open badge” about well, “domain knowledge” and the discipline/efforts required to achieve that badge with many hours of devote work.
This is an interesting idea. I don’t know anything about Acclaim, but I understand your suggestion to be about leveraging site activity/badges for external publicity, and that sounds like it could help us grow our communities. Neat!
This could be a really great way to translate vague “reputation” and “contributions” into internationally recognized form of proved experience or academic efforts. We’ll probably need to consult someone from that agency to discuss what actions and thresholds would be sufficient to grant different badges, because it seems like they already have a complicated system thought out and we’re only just now learning about this. Pretty cool find!
I don’t think this is a good match for the type of Q&A sites we’ve been used to. Neither users’ identities nor the content of their posts is verified. We can’t provide any proof that someone is actually a domain expert, all we can say is that their posts received lots of upvotes from other unverified non-experts. Maybe the software could be used by a community that does want to verify people and posts somehow, but that would be a very different type of community.
Well acclaim badges work via having a profile there, so as long as the community user has the same email address, identity shouldn’t be a big problem.
Regarding verification … well. The easier “knowledge” based badges I currently hold came out of company internal educations. I took the time to really do them, but one could also easily just scroll through them and do a very easy quiz in the end.
Obviously, the “hard” badges that require real certification would be a different story.
I think we’ll have a hard time to convince them of two things. First that we somehow qualify for their understanding of a “badge” (see below). Second, we’d have to properly identify the recipient in the first place.
From my point of view both things collide hard with a Q&A platform.
A few excerpts from their site.
Whether or not your badge is part of a pathway of badges, you must design the activities, assessment process and staff responsibilities involved in implementing the learning program.
Designing Open Badges
The process of creating a badge typically involves three tasks:
Offering a learning or other experience (often with an associated assessment)
Creating a badge to represent that experience within the Open Badges framework
Awarding the badge on successful completion of badge criteria
