Thunderbird:Open Badges

This page describes how Thunderbird might implement Mozilla.org's Open Badges.

Changelog / Current Status

• As of June 6 2012:
  • There is a beta implementation of Open Badges
  • OpenBadger (the simple interface for creating badges) is expected to be ready in Q3(ish). OpenBadger will also provide us with a URL for issuing badges.
  • We are currently working on providing Thunderbird badges on P2PU, but this is independent of Thunderbird (handled by the P2PU infrastructure)

Overview

Badges are graphic files (with embedded validation information) that people can earn by performing tasks or passing tests (or whatever else the badge issuer decides to validate). People can display these badges on their websites and on other sites that support the Open Badges infrastructure.

Questions / Unknowns

• Regarding the Backpack (where earners store their badges) I expect we'll be able to use Mozilla's repository.

Tasks that Earn Badges

These are some ideas about the criteria we might use to reward badges:

• Thunderbird Add-on Developer Badge: People who create a Thunderbird add-on that is accepted by AMO, thus demonstrating a competency in programming.
• Thunderbird Knowledge Base Author Badge: People who create a Thunderbird Knowledge Base article that uses a set of the more complex formatting tools (templates, tables, images, etc), thus demonstrating a competency in authoring on a wiki platform and technical writing.
• Thunderbird Support Contributor Badge: Roland, would it be acceptable to simply award this badge when a support contributor answers a certain number of questions?
• Thunderbird Ambassador Badge: People who create something significant outside the normal venues for contribution. For example, a Thunderbird contributor recently wrote a P2PU course and supporting workbook that explains how to set up PGP for use with Thunderbird. This is a significant effort, brings attention to Thunderbird from a whole new group.

Thunderbird Requirements

To implement the tasks mentioned above, the Thunderbird team must:

• track TB add-ons as they get added to AMO
  • make badges available to existing add-on authors?
• track Knowledge Base contributions and analyze for complexity
  • may be too time-consuming
• track support contributors and numbers of contributions
• watch the internet for non-Mozilla Thunderbird ativities
  • ie, P2PU course, Ubuntu TB manual
  • Google alerts
  • lots of work but we should be doing this anyway

Implementation

• Thunderbird is the badge issuer.
  • We would create badges through OpenBadger
• Thunderbird contributors are the badge earners
  • We would have to "manually" issue their badges (as opposed to having the badges automatically issued when earners successfully complete an exam)
• Earners could display their badges in several ways:
  • Currently Mozilla has a badge "backpack" where earners could display their badges
  • Earners could also display their badges on their personal site, blog, etc
  • As other sites adopt the technology, earners could potentially display their badges on those site(s)

Resources

Glossary

• Badge: a graphic file (PNG) that contains validation information about the Issuer, Earner, etc
• Issuer: organizations that issue badges
• Earner: people who perform tasks and earn a badge
• Displayer: website that displays an earner's badge
• OpenBadger: easy method for creating badges

Open Badges Project Docs

• Introductory blog post
• Open Badges site (links to high-level overviews of the players (issuers, earners, displayers)
• Specifications for Issuers
• OpenBadger in github