Open Badges

[LoudNoise]

Out of admittedly vague curiosity what is Open Badges all about?

[patrickjdempsey]

It's supposedly a system designed to formalize meritocracies, and make resume's "fun" and "hip". Because nothing says "hip" like a digital Scout's vest. The "Badge" itself contains a set of metatags which explain what the badge is for and who awarded it, as well as how many were offered for that task at that time. The "scarcity" of them gives them some kind of value... almost like a virtual currency, except you can't buy anything with them.

Honestly, I'm still pretty cloudy on what exactly they are supposed to be used for and by whom, as I cannot imagine a job interview ever involving the discussion of made-up "diplomas" by non-accredited or licensed institutions. It just seems like another thing that HR will never read.

[LoudNoise]

Ah, the knowledge of crowds with the Mozilla special sauce of super glue compromised with to much added water.

[patrickjdempsey]

It also appears to be a way to pimp-out their other mostly-useless technology: Persona Login.

[LoudNoise]

Which is fine. Persona Login isn't used by most of the Mozilla sites so we are talking about a bad idea anyway.

[Grumpus]

Defined : more corporate twittery.
Goes along with young executives having chipmunk sounding voices.