Mozilla Open Badges: into the great wide open
Open Badges is a simple digital badge standardization system with an extremely powerful tool at the center of it: the Open Badge Infrastructure. Thanks to the sort of swiss army knife-ness of this tool, the system is highly flexible and highly resilient. And now that we've launched beta we're beginning to see the makings of some MacGyver-esque uses of this tool.
This session will provide a through-the-looking-glass view into the development of Mozilla's Open Badges. The OBI, even in it still nascent state, has not been without its learning moments. During this 45 minute session we'll share our development processes, our information dissemination methods, our community building practices, as well as our hard-earned lessons about the best ways to engage all interested parties in creating, producing and using an open source tool.
Our learning moment observations will range from watching small Issuers become confused by our documentation to trying to land powerful Displayers to help flesh out the ecosystem. We'll discuss the ways in which our beta initiative has been buffeted by personal opinion, anecdotal evidence and a smidgen of design research. You'll see the team go from realizing that our tool needs a front end to figuring out how much front end it needs.
A new standard, even one as obvious as the Open Badge micro-standard takes a few hits getting to market—and we're still getting there. During our journey, some of our primary tenets have been called into question and we have reconsidered significant aspects of our methodology; we've been hit up with unanticipated legal questions and run into unexpected delays. We'll consider how and why this might have happened and what we did about it. You'll get a peek into the role of evangelism plus our take on an earner's right to privacy. You'll sweat with us as we delve into the tangled world of product iteration. We'll explain our process for coming to terms with ideas antithetical to a non-profit ethos, i.e., allowing your allegedly agnostic tool to be used agnostically. Along those lines, we'll examine the role of branding, focus, commitment and the 800lb gorilla of the sociocultural status quo.
Creating a new standard—even one that offers interoperability, is open source, and soon to be federated—is a serious undertaking. Join us on this raucous trip as we release Open Badges to the wild.
