From cold hard credentialing to warm fuzzy recognition — In this post, we want to explain what we talk about when we talk about Open Recognition. It builds on this previous post, and aims to move from the abstract to practicalities. So let’s introduce four scenarios and begin by defining terms. Scenarios 🎓 The first scenario is a student in…

Going beyond credentialing and the formal/informal divide — Members of WAO have spent over a decade working in an around digital credentials such as Open Badges. We’ve spent even longer in our work with learning communities of all types —both inside and outside of organisations and institutions. Over this time, we’ve become increasingly aware that there is a…

Adapting and applying existing work to combine the best elements of each — WAO is doing some really interesting work with Participate at the moment. As you can read in our previous posts about the emerging Keep Badges Weird community, we’re doing some emergent community building and catalysing the community towards sustainability. As part of that work, we thinking about the maturity not…

LocalGov Drupal, community, and open source — In our experience, you can be as ambitious or as open as you want with a project, but if you don’t have both then it’s harder to get people excited about it. The two work well together to gain traction and make a real-world difference. After all, if a project…

Keeping Badges Weird in a way that’s sustainable — In 2022, there’s a lot of online social inertia. The pandemic, coupled with people being comfortable with platforms they’ve been on for over a decade, can make it difficult to bring together people in a community on a platform with which they may not be familiar. This post shows how…

How we do it at We Are Open — A post about growing an agency. Questions by Janinah McKenzie. Answers by Doug Belshaw. What does growth look like in your business / organisation? We Are Open Co-op (WAO) is not an ‘agency’ as such but instead choose to define ourselves as “a collective of independent thinkers and makers helping charities, ethical companies, government departments and educational institutions with sensemaking…

The case of the O.G. Badger — In our work with Participate in creating and sustaining Keep Badges Weird community (KBW) we’re using stealth badges. These have a long history in the world of Open Badges — and in fact were used in the proof-of-concept School of Webcraft course run in 2011. While there are badges that…

Our January co-op day — As usual, We Are Open had our monthly co-op day (or co-op morning, to be more precise). As we head into 2022 we’re continuing to change and evolve as an organisation. This month we talked about everything from whether text should go inside or outside a digital badge through to…

Reflecting on a decade of the Open Badges ecosystem — Today, a pre-recorded keynote panel conversation goes live to kick off the 2021 International Council of Badges & Credentials Symposium. My interlocuters were Kerri Lemoie and Phillip Long and we could have talked for hours! As I was preparing for this panel discussion, I made notes which turned into this…