🤩 Convening systems for maturity and development — Overview This post outlines different types of work that needs to take place when planning, sustaining, and developing a Community of Practice. It is informed by work that WAO have carried out with Participate around the Keep Badges Weird community over the last 10 months. 📚 KBW Case Study The stages…

💼 + 🤗 = 🚀 — Yesterday, the draft Verifiable Credentials for Education, Employment, and Achievement Use Cases report was published. It’s worth a read for anyone interested in Open Badges, microcredentials, or certification. The next version of the Open Badges specification (v3.0) will be compatible with Verifiable Credentials (VCs). …

Collective imaginings of what is possible (or desirable!) — In a previous post, we looked at a typology of Open Source communities. This got us thinking about other indicators that could be plotted against one another on 2x2 grids. Tools like this are useful when deciding as a community how you want to interact. The idea here is not…

Towards a new typology of projects based on user and contributor growth — I’ve just finished reading Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal (now Nadia Asparouhova). I discovered it via an a16z podcast episode entitled Learning from Open Source Communities. People often use the term ‘Open Source’ in a way that downplays the extremely heterogenous…

How to take steps to recognise and encourage pro-social behaviours — Anyone can create a badging system, if by ‘badging system’ we mean ‘lots of badges for discrete things’. Too often, though, these badges focus on credentialing rather than recognition. Open Recognition is the awareness and appreciation of talents, skills and aspirations in ways that go beyond credentialing. This includes recognising…

Our easy-to-repeat workshop for The Badge Summit 2022! — In early August 2022, at The Badge Summit, we’re running a workshop related to Keep Badges Weird. This is an emerging Community of Practice exploring the badges landscape and helping people understand that badges are more than just credentials. In this session, we’re using an organising metaphor of co-creating pizza…

Tactics to help get things moving, pronto! — Often, when WAO is brought in to help with a community-focused project, we’re there for both strategic thinking and to provide quick wins. Laura’s previous post is a good example of some of the former, whereas this post aims to share examples of the latter. It may also be interesting/useful…

Kicking off work with Sport England and CAST — WAO recently started collaborating with Joe Roberson on some work around helping organisations affiliated with Sport England work more openly. We’re being funded for this work by CAST. In our kick-off sessions with representatives of some of the 21 organisations involved with the programme, we asked two really simple questions…

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…