Discussion: swag + badges?

[limikael]

Note: This issue was moved from an older repository. See updates and discussion attached to the original here: tunapanda/old.swag#4

The purpose of this Issue is to provide a space for people to comment on the viability (or lack thereof) and desirability (or lack thereof) of using badging systems like Mozilla's openbadges as part of Swag.

A Swagmap is a collection of acknowledgements of user achievement.

A badge is a an acknowledgement of user achievement that:

• Follows an established spec
• Is portable between various badge stores (e.g. Mozilla Backpack, Achievery, others)
• Supports digital signing (though I'm unclear how many implementations actually do this)

...basically, it seems that representing swag achievements with badges could both give us a solid framework to build on, and add value to the swag a user collects.

However, there are some major hurdles that would need to be overcome for us to be able to do this, including but not limited to (note that these are based on conversations with people and some cursory looking through the spec; everything below could be completely wrong! I'm just putting it down so we have somewhere to start the conversation):

1. Elimination of online dependencies: It seems like the spec could be implemented in such a way that the assertion of achievement does not have to be sent to a remote badge store, but could instead be generated locally in a way that could be uploaded to a store later, but its unclear to what extent it has.
2. Self-containedness: Again, it seems like the spec can allow for some kind of digital signing, but it doesn't seem to be very commonly implemented. Everyone I've talked to agrees that having a badge as a standalone .png file that can be verified by anyone with the issuer's public key, and maybe even has extra metadata steganographically encoded into it would be really cool, but no one has been sure whether it's been done, or even if it could be done.
3. Security: Having the issuer be a classroom server not connected to the internet means storing the signing key somewhere students could theoretically get at it. One way around this might be to symmetrically encrypt the key with a passphrase that should (emphasis on "should") only be known to instructors, but even this is sub-optimal.