OpenBadges

Different people are showing different types of interest around OpenBadges but there is a lot of disconnection so far.

Why earn badges for Wikimedia volunteers?
Badges are virtual representations (a graphic) of achievement: skills, learning, involvement, community, etc. For example, someone might earn a badge for attending an editathon, creating a project, or learning to edit Wikipedia in assigned coursework. When individuals display those badges on a public site, employers or institutions can click on the badge to find out what that individual had to do to earn the badge.

Volunteers can earn badges as a means to ‘count’ and display their learning experiences. Some badges are set up to be claimed by the earner as the criteria are met and the evidence for it can be provided, and some badges might be issued without the earner claiming the badge, in which case the badge issuer provides the evidence of a particular achievement.

Why issue badges for our volunteers?
Issuing badges have the potential to help retain editors of our different projects. Research on other online communities show that this encourages longer and deeper participation. This is in line with the stated goal of the Wikimedia Foundation to increase editor retention. However, so far there is no working extension for issuing Open Badges on Wikimedia’s projects.

Problems
It is not possible to create, award or earn badges in MediaWiki. Also, there is no reliable third party issuing platform. Few of those that do exist are advanced enough to automatically issue badges based on a trigger.

Previous work

 * Badges were discussed at Meta.
 * Wikimedia Sverige has been working on developing a set of badges, using triggers, for translatewiki.net here.
 * Persona extension...
 * Wikimedia UK...
 * Project:New contributors... (Quim Gil to add more details here. Basically: just an idea, contact established with Mozilla in SF, no specific plans so far).
 * The established w:de:Wikipedia:Mentorenprogramm and the more recent Wikipedia:Teahouse are using own badges for new editors. The English would be interested in considering OpenBadges but they have no technical (or otherwise) resources to lead this.
 * I'm implementing an open badges solution for my moodle based adoption school.OrenBochman (talk) 15:21, 23 July 2013 (UTC)