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 toppings to delve into how to design an equitable, emergent badge system that works for Communities of Practice. We want the session to be accessible to those who can’t make it to Boulder, Colorado for The Badge Summit, and so created this resource for them to be able to participate remotely!

You may find this resource useful as a starting point for workshops you run. The aim is to create an inclusive, welcoming space to help people move beyond individual badges as credentials, and towards a system of Open Recognition.

This resource is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence, as is the accompanying slide deck (apart from Bryan Mathers’ images, which are CC BY-ND). We encourage you to remix these resources for your own purposes!

Aims of the workshop

By the end of the session, participants should be able to:

  • Explain the difference between credentialing and recognition
  • Demonstrate the hallmarks of an inclusive badge system for Communities of Practice
  • Reflect on their own assumptions and experience using the pizza metaphor

Check in & Intro (15 min)

To break the ice, and to encourage participants to ‘lean forward’ rather than ‘lean back’ as the session begins, start with a question. Turning to the person sitting next to them*, participants should discuss and answer the following question prompts:

  • If you really knew me you know that….
  • If you could learn any skill, what would it be?
  • What is one of the nicest things a person has done for you?

The aim of this part of the session is to allow those who arrive slightly late not to feel like an inconvenience, to get people talking, and to create a welcoming atmosphere.

As the facilitator, indicate when time is up, and get people to share out either their own answers to the question, or other people’s that they found interesting.

Then introduce yourself and other facilitators, and go on to explain that this session is about Communities of Practice, systems of Open Badges, and Open Recognition. Go through a couple of slides explaining what Open Recognition is using images and the definition:

“Open Recognition is the awareness and appreciation of talents, skills and aspirations in ways that go beyond credentialing. This includes recognising the rights of individuals, communities, and territories to apply their own labels and definitions. Their frameworks may be emergent and/or implicit.” (What is Open Recognition, anyway?)

Explain that we’re going to use metaphors, and in particular a pizza metaphor to help people gently leave their comfort zone and examine their practice from a different perspective.

*if you are running this session remotely, the facilitator should put people into breakout rooms of three rather than two, to help participants feel safe.

Make a Pizza (20 min)

Encourage participants to get into groups of four.* You and your 3 friends are having a pizza together. Don’t overthink just make one. How is it going to look? Either provide your own paper-based materials, or use this Mural board as a template to co-create your pizza!

Once participants have created their pizzas, bring the room back together and have a look at them together. Ask why they created them this way. Answers will range from taste preferences, to dividing out the pizza equally.

Reflect that in order to build the pizza together, the groups needed to talk about individual needs, work together and design a solution. Explain that they were a Community of Practice in Pizza building!

Pizza with toppings all in a straight line

Show participants the slides demonstrating linear, cluster, and freeform ways of laying out pizza ingredients. Make the point that none of them designed linear pizza toppings, so why design linear badge systems? Make the point that in a Community of Practice the co-creation of a badge system helps decentralise power by giving community members a seat at the table.

Reiterate that working together allowed them as individuals to integrate their personal needs and expectations into the pizza. Make the point that some people needed a particular topping, while others may have been willing to sacrifice their preference for the good of the whole.

Simple badge taxonomy represented with food items: membership (mushroom), participation (pineapple), capability (salami), and mastery (basil)

Explain that if we understand the ingredients as a metaphor for different types of badges, then an useful, inclusive, successful badge system includes all kinds of elements: membership, participation, capability, and mastery.

Take questions, but remind them that this is just a metaphor and therefore being used to illustrate a point about keeping badge (systems) weird! Show other metaphors, such as stepping stones, Trivial Pursuit segments, and constellations of stars.

*if you are running this session remotely, you can either put people back into their groups of three, or re-create the rooms to be groups of four.

Discussion: Open Recognition Pathways Pizza (15 mins)

Ask participants to return to discuss in their groups* what kind of metaphors they might use to help one another, and their colleagues, understand the importance of recognition as well as credentialing.

  • How could they change some of their current practices to include Open Recognition?
  • How could they make co-designing badge systems more inclusive?
  • How could they ensure badge systems are emergent within their Communities of Practice?

After 10 minutes of discussion, allow participants to come back and share one thing they’ve learned back to the wider group. Allow people to respond to other people’s points if it’s useful for the majority of people in the room.

*if you are running this session remotely, put people back in their breakout room for this activity.

Wrap-up and next steps (10 mins)

Finally, invite people to continue the conversation by showing ways they can get involved in the Keep Badges Weird community. Show badges that can be earned through membership and participation in the community, as well as for levelling up skills and knowledge around Communities of Practice and Open Badges.

If you’ve already prepared it, allow participants to claim their “I Kept Badges Weird at X” badge, either using a claim code, or by issuing the badge using their email address. You can download image files to edit to create your own version of the badge from this Google Drive folder.

Stick around to chat to people who might be super-enthused by the ideas stimulated during the workshop, and provide easy ways to keep in touch. Congratulations, you’re done! Nice work! 🎉


Pizza toppings used under Fair Use from https://www.mrsmerry.com