Following on from our initial announcement, and in the spirit of working openly, this post documents the technical scope of the Badge Wiki project, being led by We Are Open Co-op and made possible by Participate.

CC0 Blake Guidry

Purpose & Context:

We are preparing, seeding and launching an installation of MediaWiki specifically for the Open Badges community. As part of the configuration, we will set up initial topics, templates and pages for the community to expand upon. New pages can be started by members of the Open Badges community, once they have been verified.

Badge Wiki will be branded as sponsored by Participate, and We Are Open Co-op will work with both Participate and the community to ensure a collaborative knowledge repository that speaks to the need of the community. We Are Open Co-op will document the process, meaning Participate will be associated with Badge Wiki from its inception.

Opportunity:

There are many appropriate ways to use a wiki. The wiki could part of a quest to establish the “perfect” Badges taxonomy. It can become a way to determine the common understanding we need to communicate and coordinate at a global level. More concretely, we’ve identified the need for an open place that contains:

  • This space will become a knowledge repository for the entire Open Badges community. Badge Wiki will be the place to turn when you need examples, case studies, and trusted, community- sourced documentation on badges.
  • We propose integrations with other community based projects, such as Badge News, and utilizing both templates and lightweight design elements to ensure ease of use. Through expert moderation and the marketing possibilities through our networks, we intend to build a strong community of contributors. Plenty of potential moderators from the global community are willing to lend their expertise.
  • Contributors should be foregrounded and celebrated. We will be doing this by issuing Open Badges for those who, for example, attend barn-raising sessions and step up to fill roles such as Ambassador, Contributor, and Maintainer.

Technical Requirements

At this early stage, we would like to improve the wiki aesthetics and make it usable for non-technical contributors. We foresee a need for a semantic tagging and search system. We intend to find a MediaWiki pro to provide insight and/or alternative recommendations on the following:

  • Bootstrap Skin
  • Instant Commons
  • Visual Editor
  • Anti-spam measures (a graduated response, from locking down the wiki to only a few editors, to having it ~ open to the world and actively patrolling 24/7)
  • Suggested Tags, proposed tags, semantic tool to scan text and suggest tags, perhaps Look into Open Calais (automatic text analysis)
  • HTMLets
  • Font Awesome support
  • Email authentication (users should receive a verification email and permissions to edit should be automatically set. This should be in combination with the Anti-spam measures), confirm account.
  • User creation management/moderation — Prevent spam bots from registering. They can’t do anything but may become confusing once we have thousands of bots. However to restrict registrations means we’ll have to create accounts manually. The change has to be done by adding config.php (shell access to the server). Just throwing it out there, don’t know if that’s the direction we want to go…
  • SSL / Https secure mode — When users can login the site should be in https, generally ALL Pages should be in SSL and secured.
  • Favicon to be inserted

(Ideally, we’d like something similar to the Wikipedia Community Portal, but that may come further down the line.)

Taxonomy

Taxonomy is a place we feel a need to experiment. The wiki needs a great search that defines tags and infrastructure to make the wiki usable for the offset. We’ve begun with the following considerations.

  • The wiki should have section pages but no hierarchical relationship between them (eg. everything that relates to fundraising is linked back to Fundraising)
  • Core tags may have extra weight (e.g. Metadata or Credentials). The tags are TBD.

Misc.

Recognising that we have a varying level of technical expertise within the Open Badges community, we want Badge Wiki to be as easy to use as possible. That being said, our choice of MediaWiki shows that we also want it to be powerful, customisable, and flexible.

Should you have suggestions and recommendations as to what to include/configure, we’re all ears!

We Are Open Co-op works to spread the culture, processes, and benefits of openness wherever we can.