Open Workplace Recognition using Verifiable Credentials

💼 + 🤗 = 🚀

Yesterday, the draft Verifiable Credentials for Education, Employment, and Achievement Use Cases report was published. It’s worth a read for anyone interested in Open Badges, microcredentials, or certification. The next version of the Open Badges specification (v3.0) will be compatible with Verifiable Credentials (VCs). One thing to note about VCs is that they don’t have to have a visual representation in the form of an image.

The use cases provided in the report are interesting, and Verifiable Credentials promise to solve many seemingly-intractable problems around how individual people can prove claims in privacy-respecting ways. What we noted, however, especially given our work around Open Recognition, is that there are some use cases that are likely to be transformational to learners and workers in the future of work. Both groups need control over the way that they are recognised to unlock future opportunities.

For example, the report talks about the recognition of prior learning, something which is an equity issue for those who haven’t had the same access to resources than others:

Josephina decided to return to college to finish her bachelors degree. The college she attended evaluated her work experience and determined that skills and knowledge that she attained while working qualified to replace several of the courses required for the degree.

There are countries and systems where recognising prior learning is a normal part of the learning landscape. Even in these cases, however, the aim of the activity is to assess whether an individual has met the criteria for admission to a course or institution. What VCs allow is for recognition to be turned into a credential, and therefore used as ‘currency’ not just to be ‘spent’ at that institution, but potentially anywhere.

The original vision for Open Badges was to create an “open and decentralized [ecosystem] to allow for badges from any contexts where learners are learning, to support any and all types of learning occurring, to provide portable and sustainable value and to give each learner complete control”.

Issuing Open Badges by Visual Thinkery is licenced under CC-BY-ND

The key word here is control. Although a lot of learning happens in formal education institutions, a lot of learning happens on the job through informal and non-formal learning. So how can VCs work with portfolio careers, in a world where people change jobs relatively often and need to take proof of their learning with them?

We suggest that there are the following three examples where VCs can play an important role in Open Workplace Recognition (i.e. Open Recognition in the workplace):

1. Recognition of prior learning — as discussed above, this is a way to translate knowledge, skills, and experience gained on the job into credentials that can be used more widely. This depends on an authority (the ‘Issuer’) assessing a portfolio of evidence about a person (the ‘Subject’), who will then also be able to use the VC as proof of their claim (i.e. also be the ‘Holder’).
2. Defining your own path — no two careers are ever the same, yet the way we present them can often be far too similar. VCs issued for the recognition of niche (or even unique!) things such as knowledge, skills, experience, and dispositions allows individuals to better tell their own story. One way of doing this would be to self-issue a VC (the ‘Subject’ and ‘Holder’ is also the ‘Issuer’) and then have someone else, or an organisation, endorse that claim.
3. Making recognition portable — combining the other two points, an individual may want to memorialise a particular important form of recognition they have received. This could be a tweet, a comment in an email, or anything that they want to be able to refer to in future. By self-issuing a VC (again, the ‘Subject’ and ‘Holder’ is also the ‘Issuer’) they can ask the person who gave the recognition to endorse their claim.

The purpose of standards, and the working groups which create them, is necessarily to focus on the technical elements and most common use cases. With this post, we want to widen the conversation to consider what VCs make possible that is entirely new, and that which was perhaps always latent in Open Badges.

Using a lens of Open Workplace Recognition allows us to focus about the norms, behaviours, and expectations within the world of work. We can then go a step further to think about who controls what is recognised, by whom, and how that recognition can be shared more widely.

What other examples for Open Workplace Recognition using VCs can we come up with together?