Lonely Lion

Some big changes for me this week, I started a consulting company, and kicked off my first client assignment – helping the Mozilla Foundation with the Open Badges Project.

Open Badges give credit for learning outside of a traditional institutional setting. The kind of learning that matters, but isn’t often officially credited. Anyone can issue a badge, sign it (through a nifty cryptographic scheme), and anyone can display their badges in their own ‘backpack’. That relatively simple explanation opens the door for lots of peer-to-peer style education opportunities. It’s a disruptive idea, as disruptive to the current education system as the Awesome Foundation is to philanthropy.

The big mind hack of the Awesome Foundation is to convince people that they can create change in their communities without the help of large charitable organizations. It doesn’t discount the work those organizations do, it enables people to have a meaningful impact without their approval or help. Open Badges has the same potential  – give the ability for people to acknowledge one another’s skills without the help of a large institution. The Open Badges Infrastructure (OBI) runs anywhere, and won’t need Mozilla to issue a badge, or even sign off on or host a badge.

Social change aside, it’s also a cool project from a technical perspective. Built on Node.js, developed in the clear on Github, with a team of super smart folks, it will certainly be a great learning experience, and a lot of fun to work on. I’m thrilled to be a part of it. I’m going to take any opportunity to speak about the project I can find, both from a technical and non-technical perspective. As talks emerge, I’ll update @chmcavoy. The project is also hiring full-time Node engineers, if you’re interested – drop me a line.