We are thankful for Keep Badges Weird

It is Thanksgiving week for all the people who celebrate it. We Are Open folks live in the UK and Europe though, so we’re just going to use this time to say thank you!

Thank you for this awesome first year of Keep Badges Weird!

Thank you for all the great discussions, community calls and reaching out to each other!

And thank you to all the community members that have joined and shared:

• Don for contributing so much to Badge Wiki,
• Alex for having all the questions and links and comments,
• Philippe for sharing his great work around Open Recognition,
• Anabella for Keeping Badges Weird in her keynotes and work,
• Esther for sharing her projects online and offline,
• Simone for all his great weird badge ideas
• Mark and Julie for supporting this work and their sparkling ideas,
• Matt for rhyming his badge framework,
• Justin for rocking the rich skills descriptors work,
• And also many other people that we can’t name, for all your work around Open Badges, Open Recognition and Keeping Badges Weird!

One year of Keep Badges Weird in blog posts

We always write blog posts to document processes and reflect on our work. In this first year of Keep Badges Weird we wrote lots of reflections, promising practices, invitations and other posts. It was great fun to head into our archive and see where we came from and where we got with the community. Here are four lists of all the posts we’ve written so far.

Community Building

These posts dive into the nuts and bolts of community building.

• Catalysing the KBW community — Keeping Badges Weird in a way that’s sustainable 3 Tips on how to build a sustainable community with the example of Keep Badges Weird.
• 🔥 Towards a maturity model for online, networked communities (v0.1) — Adapting and applying existing work to combine the best elements of each Showcasing our work around community maturity and how we intend to grow KBW.
• Steps to Success when building a Community of Practice — 🤩 Convening systems for maturity and development Collecting all the theoretical work we’ve done around advocacy, systems convening and community development into a handy guide for other communities.
• How to be a great moderator — A simple moderation process A good community needs good moderators. In this post we explain how to be one.

Activism

KBW isn’t just a community of practice, it’s a community advocating for open recognition. These posts explain some of how we think about that purpose.

• Advocating for learner-centric badge systems — Some thoughts on campaigning for the right things What is KBW advocating for?
• What is Open Recognition, anyway? — Going beyond credentialing and the formal/informal divide Opening the discussion around Recognition vs. Credentialing again.
• How badges can change the world — Part 1: The Two Loops Model for Open Recognition advocacy “As one system begins to deteriorate, a new system begins to emerge. This got us thinking about how this model applies to the world of Open Recognition.”
• How badges can change the world — Part 2: Why we need to transition “To heal ourselves and our world, we need lifelong learners who are curious about the world and actively try to make it better.”
• Keep Badges Weird is about breaking boundaries — How the KBW community is convening systems Breaking down the ways in which the KBW community is convening systems, through the lens of the Wenger-Trayner Model.
• Open Recognition is for every type of learning — From cold hard credentialing to warm fuzzy recognition Building on a previous post, a list of scenarios to help explain what we mean when we talk about Open Recognition.

Badge Design

These posts showcase how we build badges for the community and beyond.

• Designing Badges for Co-creation and Recognition — Individual Learner, Communities of Practice Reflection on co-creating badges with WAO’s intern (that was me!) but also how to co-create badges in a Community of Practice.
• WTF are ‘Stealth Badges’? — The case of the O.G. Badger Did you earn one of the stealth badges yet?
• Keep Badges Weird: helping people understand the badges landscape — Our easy-to-repeat workshop for The Badge Summit 2022! A workshop explaining how to design equitable and emergent badge systems with the help of pizza metaphors. With CC-licenced resources.

Events

KBW is hosting events as well as attending events. This posts are invitations but also reflections.

• Keep Badges Weird… — at the Badge Summit Invitation to join us for the launch of Keep Badges Weird on the 27th October 2021 at remote the Badge Summit.
• Join the Keep Badges Weird Community Call! Invitation to KBW’s first community call.
• Emergent community building Reflecting on the first community call.
• Summing up Badge Summit — More system convening, community recognition and a dose of whimsy and weirdness Reflection on what we experienced at the Badge Summit in Boulder, Colorado. Spoiler: It was a lot!!

Thank you for this year!

We are looking foward to another great year, new ideas, more discussions, more advocacy and all your inputs.

To end of this year we created a 1st Birthday survey because vibes and feels are great, but data is also important. We’ll share back our findings, but need at least 10% of the community to fill in the survey for it to be meaningful.

🎉 Fill in the KBW 1st Birthday Survey! 🎉​

See you all in the community!